


The Sickness

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [28]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 13:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 37,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16119851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The Animorphs have a problem. Well, two problems. The first is that Ax is sick, and without treatment, he will die.The second is that Aftran, Cassie's yeerk friend who knows all their secrets, has been discovered as a traitor. If the Animorphs can't rescue her before Visser Three interrogates her, the yeerks will know everything. Oh, and Ax's illness is contageous, putting Animorph after Animorph out of action. With two time limits and a dwindling workforce, they're going to have to come up with something fast, before everyone on their side ends up dead or captured. And when you're fighting body snatchers, it's hard to know which fate is worse.





	1. Chapter 1

There are a lot of details about morphing that I still don’t really understand.

For example, it was obvious that acquiring a morph involved more than getting DNA – there was so much to making an animal that didn’t come from DNA alone, and our ability to morph lycra and earring scars and haircuts and so forth intact clearly indicated a kind of ‘scan’ that depended on some subconscious conception of what ‘counted’ as part of the morph. But if that was the case, then how did the morph ‘know’ about all the important internal organs that we ourselves didn’t know about, such as when we morphed aliens? If we morphed something with unknown internal injuries, we didn’t morph those injuries, so it wasn’t simply duplicating whatever was inside. My leopard I’d acquired had been starving, and my leopard morph was perfectly healthy, even though I had no idea what sort of organ damage he’d had beyond being painfully thin.

Furthermore, what happened with all of the bacteria that lived on every animal, keeping it alive and healthy? A sterile animal would die within days of being exposed to the outside world, and Tobias had survived getting trapped (as had I), so clearly we morphed with those bacteria. Yet morphing sick animals didn’t leave us sick. We didn’t even know anything about, let alone were capable of properly conceiving of, the billions of bacteria living on the skin and in the digestive tract of pretty much anything we morphed. How did the morph ‘know’?

How did our bird morphs know how to fly? Flying was a learned behaviour, not instinctive. Most of the ‘instinctive’ things our animals did were taught. If I acquired, say, a pigeon whose wings had been clipped before it learned how to fly, and then morphed it, ending up with an intact bird, would that morph know how to fly? Did the morph pull the knowledge from the mind somehow? How would it be able to differentiate such knowledge from things like memory, which never came with a morph?

How did our own memories and thoughts even end up in our morphs? Ax occasionally warned us against morphing anything that didn’t have some kind of nervous system, but the complexity of that nervous system didn’t seem to matter. A fly brain simply didn’t have the capacity to store a human mind in it, yet I had no problem at all thinking just like a human when I was a fly, so long as the instincts didn’t distract me. And yet, if I were suffocating under the effects of bug spray, I suddenly found it very hard to think and focus, as if my mind were being deprived of oxygen… so was the mind dependent on the morph or not? Did my mind live in the fly brain (in which case, how did it fit and how could the information possibly be coherently transferred from one type of brain to another), or did it not (in which case, why did brain-impairing things affect the mind)? And if I wasn’t thinking in a morph’s brain, but in some kind of zero-space pseudobrain… what did that mean when I wasn’t in morph? Was I using my human brain then, or was I forever distant from it? A chilling thought.

Or what about food? If I turned into Rachel, ate some fries, and turned back, what happened to the fries? Did it come with me? (What if I lost control of a bird morph and ate a spider or something; did it end up in my human stomach? What if I ate something that was poisonous to humans and then demorphed?) Or maybe it got morphed away; maybe the morph somehow ‘knew’. If so, was it part of the morph from then on? Did it come back if I morphed again, or was it lost to zero-space forever? By eating in morph, were we slowly decreasing Earth’s biomass?

Actually, never mind. I was pretty sure I knew where the undigested food we ate in morph went. It was somehow pulled out of zero-space at school, and became the cafeteria food.

I picked at my lunch, trying to convince myself that lumpy grey potatoes and soft gooey peas somehow counted as food.

“So,” Rachel said, “Marco or Baby Spice?”

“What?” I asked.

“On the desert island. Would you rather be stuck on a desert island with Marco or with Baby Spice?”

I pulled my mind to the current conversation and glanced over the other side of the cafeteria, where Jake and Marco were eating with some of Jake’s old basketball buddies. Somehow, throughout the war and everything, Jake had managed to avoid becoming a complete loner.

“Can Marco still… you know?” I didn’t want to say ‘morph’ at school.

“No, and neither can you.”

“Hmm. I’d still take him over Baby Spice. I think Marco might know more survival skills and help us live until we got rescued.” I considered this a moment. “But then, I know nothing about Baby Spice except that she’s a Spice Girl. Maybe she goes camping on the weekends?”

“I don’t think you understand how to play this game right,” Rachel said.

“It’s perfectly logical to – ”

“Shh! Listen to Allison and Brittany,” Rachel suddenly hissed.

Allison and Brittany were sitting on the table next to ours. From my vague understanding of how high school cliques worked, it seemed that they’d sort of taken over Rachel’s popular-girl role when she’d started getting too busy with the Animorphs. They weren’t difficult to overhear, making no real attempt to keep their voices down.

“Maybe I should ask him to the dance,” Allison said.

“Oh, you should,” Brittany urged. “Jake has gotten so cute.”

Jake? As in my Jake? It was a pretty common name. I snuck a glance at the pair. They were, indeed, looking over to where Jake was making a comment to a basketballer named Juan, who laughed.

Rachel leaned back to intercept Allison’s line of sight. “Hey, Allison.”

Allison looked at her suspiciously. “What?”

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“Not Jake. Uh-uh. Jake is with Cassie.”

Allison and Brittany both turned their focus to me, assessing me. I tried not to blush. My hair had grown enough since my last haircut to frizz, my nails and cuticles were a shredded mess from working in the barn, and I hadn’t even looked at makeup since the last wedding I’d attended. I was pretty sure there was bird poop on my jeans, too, from the seagull I’d spent the early morning holding still while my father carefully cut tangled fishing line off its wing.

Allison tossed her long red ponytail over her shoulder. “It doesn’t look like they’re together,” she said. “Cassie’s over here. And Jake’s over there. Waaay over there. As opposed to right here.”

“Has he even asked her to the dance yet?” Brittany asked. Still talking to Rachel, of course. Both girls acted like I wasn’t even there. I was used to that.

“Of course he’s asked her to the dance,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes. “And if you will excuse us, Allison, Brittany, Cassie and I are going over there. Waaaaay over there.” She picked up her lunch tray in one hand, mine in the other, and headed towards Jake. I opened my mouth to apologise to Allison and Brittany, but I’d already been deleted from their personal universe.

I jogged to keep up with Rachel’s impossibly long strides. “That wasn’t necessary,” I mumbled. “We both know there’s no way Jake is going to find time to go to a stupid dance anyway.”

“That’s not the point,” Rachel muttered. “Didn’t they see you guys sitting together all of last week? How strong a hint do they need? Are they dense?”

“I think you overestimate my visibility in school.”

Rachel put her tray down at an empty seat on Jake’s table, and put mine down next to Jake. Everyone got the message; Juan moved over to make room for me and I slunk into place next to him.

“We’re going to the dance Tuesday night,” Rachel told Jake, “and you are taking Cassie.”

Jake choked on his macaroni and beef. The guy next to him, who I vaguely recalled was named Terry, slapped his back.

“I think there’s a chance that Jake might be _a bit too busy_ for something like a dance,” I said pointedly to Rachel, who ignored me.

“Big Jake? Busy? Like that’s likely,” Terry snorted.

“So I’m guessing you need a date for this dance too, huh, Rachel?” Marco asked, his eyes wide. “I think I can make room in my schedule for you.”

Rachel looked suddenly fascinated. “What was that, Marco? You saw a flying pig?! Really?!” To the three guys who had opened their mouths to talk, she said, “I will be going to the dance _with my boyfriend_.” They all closed their mouths again.

Me, I just shook my head. We were fighting a war. Of course we wouldn’t have time for some stupid school dance.


	2. Chapter 2

“Have you completely lost your mind?” David asked Jake, tugging on his sleeve. Rachel slapped his hand away and adjusted the line of his jacket. “This is dangerous, pointless, _and_ a waste of time. A rare trifecta!”

“It’s not my plan,” Jake said, shrugging helplessly.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Rachel said, so long as you don’t demorph and we keep Ax away from the snacks there’s no reason anyone should – stop messing with your hair, will you? It’s curly tonight. Get over it. Tobias, haven’t you ever tied a tie before?” She rushed over to adjust it. All of the boys’ faces reflected an experience very familiar to me – the regret of someone who had let Rachel dress them for an event, and was realising that it was way too late to back out.

Turns out I’m not very good at learning from such experiences, because the dress I was wearing – an actual _dress_ – was certainly not something I had any input in selecting. The only thing I was wearing that I’d bought myself was my powder-blue bangle, and even that had been with Rachel.

Satisfied with Tobias’ tie, she stood back and gave him an all-over look before continuing. “Jake hasn’t lost his mind, but we’re all in danger of it. Being Animorphs is getting completely out of hand. We’ve been taken to space, blown up alien continents, and in the past few months we found a millionaire yeerk cannibal, fought the handpicked troops of Cosmic Hitler, and stopped aliens releasing a designer virus on our planet. You,” she jabbed a finger at David, “lost your parents again last week; you,” this time she pointed to Ax, “lost your people again last week, half of my old friends are guerrilla gymnasts fighting the other half of my old friends who are controlled by aliens while the rest of my friends are here, constantly on the verge of death; Tobias is a bird; Cassie has disappeared twice without a trace and nearly died alone; Jake is trying to lead this little army without letting on that he’s a war general to his enemy over the breakfast table; and I know all of us have been getting barn sedatives from Cassie to sleep occasionally, we all know it’s happening, there’s no reason to keep pretending it isn’t.

“Tonight, we are going to do something normal. We are going to go to a high school dance, and we are going to have a nice time, and we are going to drink possibly-spiked punch from paper cups and eat stale chips and complain about the music. We are going to watch somebody do something stupid and gossip about it at school for the next two weeks, we are going to come home later than we told our parents we would, and we are going to be tired and grumpy at school tomorrow morning. Is everyone clear?”

“Yes, Rachel,” we all chorused.

“Good. Now, Ax and Tobias have outfits easy to remove for morphing; David, you’re about your normal height and build, so you shouldn’t have a problem. Everyone remember that the school is full of alien infiltrators and we should be fine.” She pumped a fist in the air. “Now let’s go be normal teenagers!”

She marched off toward the school, the rest of us trailing behind.

“Something weird is going to happen, I just know it,” Marco muttered. “Any time we try to do something normal, something weird happens. On that note, Cassie, I need you to acquire a pig.”

I blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re the best morpher. I need you to turn into a pig, but with like, osprey wings. So Rachel can see a flying pig, you know?”

“I… don’t think a pig would be light enough to fly like that.”

“You won’t actually have to fly. It’ll be hilarious.”

“Hey numbskulls,” David hissed. “We’re about to walk into a crowd of potential enemies.”

The dance was pretty poorly guarded, actually. The teacher on the door eyeballed us, noticed we were all teenagers, and let us in. Nobody noticed that half of us weren’t actually students.

The inside was what I’d expected. Loud music. A table with chips and dip and trail mix. Groups of students, mostly single-sex, eyeing groups of students of the opposite sex. I rubbed at my face, only for Rachel to slap my hand away. “Makeup,” she hissed. One of her hands was gripping Tobias’; with the other, she grabbed Ax’s wrist and stopped him from heading for the snack table. She shoved Ax’s wrist at David, who stepped back, shaking his head.

“They’ll think we’re gay,” he mumbled. Rachel rolled her eyes.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Marco said, sounding amused. “Ax-man, that girl over there is checking you out.”

“No way, she’s looking at me,” Tobias said. He watched Rachel carefully, checking for a reaction, but she just smiled and fluttered her eyelashes.

“You can have a nice time and take her back to your tree,” she said, and Tobias laughed.

I glanced over at ‘that girl’. It was Allison. Apparently she’d decided that if she couldn’t have Jake, she could at least have the cute new boy.

Rachel, apparently satisfied that nobody was about to commit immediate social suicide, drifted onto the sparsely populated dance floor with Tobias. Jake and I stood awkwardly next to each other while David, bored, drifted over to the snacks. Ax glanced from Allison to Marco, confused.

“Checking me out? What does that mean?”

“It means she’s warm for your form,” Marco informed him. “She wants your body.”

“My body? Body, body, baw-dee?” Ax asked nervously.

“She’s making her move,” Marco warned him, “although if you want to get rid of her, you could always just say ‘baw-dee’ like that a few times.”

Allison was, indeed, drifting over. Ax looked nervous; was that sweat beading on his forehead?

“Bun-dee,” Ax muttered under his breath. “B-dee.”

Allison tossed her hair and flashed Ax a winning smile. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Allison.”

“My name is Axim – Maximillian,” Ax replied. His hands seemed to be shaking.

“Pleased to meet you, Max,” she said. “Would you like to, um, dance?”

Ax nodded. “I would like to shuffle my artificial hooves with you,” he said, “but you cannot have my body. Mo bod-dee. Baaaw-dee.”

The smile drained from Allison’s face. “Um, actually, I think I can hear my friend calling me from over there,” she said. And bolted.

Marco doubled over and snorted into the inside of his elbow. Jake turned quickly away to hide a grin. I bit my own tongue.

“That was worth waiting for,” Jake said. He turned his grin on me. “Would you like to dance?”

“I’m not very good,” I mumbled.

“I dance like a lumberjack,” Jake admitted.

“A lumberjack who’s chopped one of his legs of,” Marco interjected. “A one-legged blind lumberjack whose remaining leg is a tree stump and who – ”

Jake put his arms on my hips and led me out onto the dance floor. I tried to look like a dignified human instead of a pile of overwhelmed jelly as we found a bit of empty space and started to dance. Is it bad that I hoped that everyone was watching? Especially Allison?

“So are we, like, properly going out now?” I asked him.

He blushed. “If you don’t want to – ”

“No! No, I do. I just want to, you know, know.”

“Me too.”

We danced in awkward silence for a bit. Then Jake said, “Well I mean, if you want to be going out and I want to be going out...”

“Then it’s the logical thing,” I finished for him.

“Right.”

We kept dancing.

I’ve liked Jake since before we were Animorphs. Since we were kids, really – the cute older cousin of my best friend. I knew he probably wouldn’t have ever noticed me if we hadn’t been Animorphs, I knew I wasn’t good enough for him, but just for the moment, I intended to enjoy myself.


	3. Chapter 3

For the first hour or so, the dance was uneventful. Great, even. Ax wanted nothing to do with the snack table, which said a lot about the quality of the food since I had watched him eat actual napkins before; David had shapeshifted himself into the most classically handsome possible combination of all his human morphs and started chatting up Allison; Jake and I danced and talked about normal high school things and I tried not to be bothered by Mr Chapman (a known controller) and Mr Tidwell (the strictest teacher in the school), who were on door duty. I also tried not to think of that time we’d kissed in an alien city, because the memory tended to make me kind of flustered.

The only tricky point was when we overheard two boys, who were staring at Tobias, whispering things like ‘Oh my god, is that _Tobias_?’ and ‘How is he still so scrawny?’ But they didn’t make any move to call the cops or anything; they just followed him to the bathroom when he went to demorph, and spent the rest of the night avoiding him and nursing their wrists and jaws. To be honest, I wasn’t watching that hard; Rachel had made it her personal mission to make sure that everyone had an absolutely perfect normal night and I was happy to leave her to it.

Which is why it wasn’t until I saw her staring Ax with horrified fascination that I noticed the lump on his forehead.

It certainly hadn’t been there at the start of the night. But there it was, a large bulge sticking out just above his right eye, bumping and throbbing in time with the music. I nudged Jake. Jake met Rachel’s eyes. Rachel glanced at Ax.

And like that, Jake and I were making a beeline for Ax, while Rachel was dragging Tobias away by the wrist. Some random boy noticed, and gave Tobias a wink, a grin, and a thumbs-up.

“We have to get him in the darkest corner where no one will see,” Jake muttered. I could see why he was worried. The bulge was becoming larger by the second, like something was about to erupt from Ax’s face; I was reminded of the time a crocodile had emerged from Rachel’s back. Ax was red and sweaty and sort of twitchy. Was that it? Was Ax allergic to a new morph? No, no; he would have told us.

“Where no one will see?” I hissed. “It’s a school dance, Jake! It’s designed to be as visible to the chaperones as possible!” I glanced at Chapman by the door. He looked bored, but I was pretty sure he’d notice if a live animal erupted from an unfamiliar student’s body. If something happened that caused a freakout, the best case scenario was everyone in the hall being herded down to the Yeerk Pool. The worst case scenario was Ax being in that group, and maybe us for even being remembered as hanging around him.

Rachel had returned, sans Tobias. In her hands was a bandana; no, I realised, it was Tobias’ shirt. It had been folded into a bandana. As she approached, the throbbing bulge grew larger, larger… and erupted into a stalk eye.

Rachel whipped the bandana over his head and tied it in place. It actually looked pretty good.

“Ax,” I hissed, “what’s wrong? You can’t demorph here!”

“Demorph,” he muttered. “Dededeeeeemorph. Dee. Dee. That’s a very pleasant mouth sound. Dee!”

He was delirious. And flushed, and sweaty… I put the back of my hand against his cheek. It’s a terrible way to measure temperature, but one thing was immediately obvious. He had a fever. A high one.

“Sure, everyone loves a good ‘dee’,” muttered Marco, who had come over.

“Hey chuckleheads,” David hissed, “If there’s a problem, how about we _not all crowd around it in an obvious manner_?”

“He’s right,” Jake said. “Rachel, Cassie, get him out. Everyone else – ”

But just then, Allison came over to see what David had wandered off for. Ax took one look at her and squeaked in panic.

“My body!” he gasped, pointing at her. “She wants my body! My bdee!”

And then he turned and bolted for the door, trying to shove his way between a very surprised Mr Chapman and Mr Tidwell and sprint out into the hall.

Naturally, we followed.

Mr Tidwell grabbed Ax by the wrist. “He’s obviously drunk,” he was telling Mr Chapman. “I know this boy’s parents. I’ll call them.”

“Is this going to cause a scene?”

“It might be worth checking the punch.” Tidwell turned and marched Ax down the hall. He was not, I noticed, heading towards Reception or the teacher’s office or anywhere else likely to have a phone. Ax was mumbling under his breath.

We made to follow. Marco, Jake and I went for the door while Rachel and David weaved back among the other students, distracting those who were staring.

Chapman blocked our path. “Students need to stay in the hall unless they have parental permission to leave,” he said.

“Max is our friend,” Jake said, pointing at the delirious andalite being half-dragged down the hall. “He’s got a… a condition.”

“Epilepsy,” Marco said. “Or narcolepsy. Some kind of epsy.”

“We have his medication,” I added, doing my best impression of Rachel’s I’m-so-innocent face.

Chapman stared at us for a few seconds, then stepped aside. “Two minutes.”

“Thanks, Mr Chapman!” Jake called as we thundered past and down the hall. Tidwell and Ax had turned a corner; we caught up with them just as Tidwell was herding Ax into an empty classroom. Ax’s bandana was loose and seemed to be waving about, although Tidwell didn’t seem to notice.

“Nobody will come by here,” he was saying quietly. “You have ten minutes before – ” He looked up and saw us all skidding to a stop, about a classroom away. His characteristic stern frown fell into place, but he stepped back. Jake, Marco and I quickly stepped forward to shield Ax from view. I was already mentally adjusting my schedule to account for how many detentions all this was going to cost us.

“Max isn’t drunk, Mr Tidwell,” I said quickly. “He’s just sick.”

“We have his pills,” Jake added. “We just need to get him some water. We can handle this.”

“I heard that some boys were planning to set off cherry bombs in the toilets,” Marco added. “If you hurry, you might be able to catch them.”

I could feel my blood turning to ice. This wasn’t going to work. This couldn’t work. Mr Tidwell was the strictest teacher in school. People didn’t even sneeze in his classes. Even Marco didn’t joke in his classes.

Ax’s hand was in mine. I could feel it shrinking, feel it growing extra fingers. He was humming some kind of advertising jingle under his breath and swaying slightly. Jake had both eyes on Mr Tidwell; Marco was scanning the hall, checking our exits and our cover options.

But Mr Tidwell seemed, miraculously, to accept this, he nodded once, then turned to head back toward the dance.

At that moment, several things happened very quickly. Two legs shot from Ax’s chest, throwing his entire body forward. The shirt bandana fluttered from his head to the floor. As he fell forward, he reflexively swung out his tail (which I hadn’t been aware he had), smacking Tidwell across the shoulders and knocking him to the floor. Tidwell turned, scrambled to get up, and froze.

There we were. Jake, Marco and I, all standing in full view, a half-morphed andalite between us. And there on the ground, Mr Tidwell, staring right at us, showing absolutely no confusion over what Ax was. In the middle of our high school, the local hub for yeerk activity.

“Well,” Mr Tidwell commented drily. “This is awkward.”

“Awwwwkwaaaaard,” Ax mumbled, and giggled.


	4. Chapter 4

Before we had really decided what to do, Tidwell had rolled to his feet and dashed for the classroom door. We followed him inside, and he kicked the door closed behind us. Apart from us five, the classroom was empty.

Tidwell was standing in the open, both arms raised, palms empty. “You have to keep him out of the halls,” he said, nodding at Ax. “You have to get him out of here. What on earth possessed you to bring him to this school in the first place?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I said defensively.

“Kind of not the point is it?” Marco asked. He pointed accusingly at Tidwell. “You’re a controller.”

“All of the staff here are controllers,” Tidwell said. “Do we have time for this right now? You are surrounded by enemies, something is obviously wrong with your andalite, and you need to get him out of here.”

We all exchanged glances. I knew we were all doing the same math. We couldn’t let Tidwell just walk off, having seen what he’d seen. We couldn’t… take care of matters here, in a school, even if someone in our group had the stomach to do so at all. Ideally, we’d take him off to the shack in the woods and wait three days, but the three of us couldn’t safely get both him and Ax out, and David and Rachel were still trapped in the dance…

Tidwell sighed impatiently. “Cassie, there is a Dracon beam in a holster under my jacket, at my back. If you would?”

He didn’t lower his arms. Carefully, I stepped forward and disarmed him. He sat down at a desk, placing his empty hands flat on the surface. “There. Now I suggest that you two extricate your friend while Cassie keeps an eye on me. Is that acceptable?”

“We don’t trust you,” Marco said.

“I believe that I have just arranged matters so that that is not an issue,” he said crisply in the same tone he used on someone who hadn’t done their homework. “Go on, boys.”

They both automatically stepped towards the door. Jake looked to me. “We can’t leave you alone here,” he said, looking worried.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. I was watching Ax, whose stalk eyes were vanishing and emerging one at a time. “Just get him out.”

“Be careful,” Jake said, as if I were an idiot. They left.

Tidwell watched them go. Once the classroom door clicked shut, he visibly relaxed. That just made me more worried. Tidwell had to know that there was no good way out of this for him, or at least for the yeerk; I had him at gunpoint, and yet he looked perfectly calm. He hadn’t shown any surprise to see Ax, didn’t seem at all confused about me or Jake or Marco, and had mostly seemed to want to keep Ax out of sight and get him out of the building. The only way any of it could make sense is if… if he saw Ax’s stalk eye in the dance floor, before Rachel got his bandana on, and wanted the glory of capturing him to himself. But when we’d gone to get him and he’d seen Ax demorphing in front of us, he must have known that the only way to get out alive would be to get rid of most of us. He’d lured us into the classroom he was attempting to take Ax into to infest him or take him to the Yeerk Pool or something, then chosen a new target – me, probably thinking I was the weakest Animorph. And now here we were, alone, in his trap.

I gripped the Dracon beam tight, wondering if I’d be able to muster the nerve to use it if I had to. I’d killed before, of course, but rarely humans, and never people I knew. And nothing about this situation made sense

But Tidwell didn’t make any kind of aggressive move. He just spoke. “This is a more dangerous method than I’d planned, but it’s a stroke of luck, in a way,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find a way to speak with you alone all night.”

“With me?” I asked.

He nodded. “I have an urgent message for you,” he said, “from Aftran Nine Four Two of the Katt Dialma pool.”


	5. Chapter 5

I don’t know what I was expecting. That hadn’t been it.

“What?” I asked.

“My name is Illim. Aftran is a good friend of mine. She changed my life, my – look, very long story short, we had a minor security breach about a fortnight ago. One of our lower-tier members noticed an infiltration alarm had been set off by an andalite and made the rather unwise and poorly-thought-out decision to ignore it. We – ”

“Slow down,” I said. “‘One of our members’? What the hell is going on?”

“Of course. You wouldn’t have had any contact. A Voluntary Movement has been instigated on Earth.”

“A what?”

“A… political ideology. Some yeerks believe that it is wrong to enforce our control on unwilling hosts. Such thoughts have always existed, but are almost never safe to express, and yeerks who are reluctant to take any host they can get tend to find themselves without one at all. Until now.”

“What happened?”

“Aftran happened. We became… organised.” He smiled a little smile. “She said something about memetic evolution and information strategy… anyway, what was once whispers is now a movement.”

My mind swam with the possibilities. Yeerks as invading aliens were a huge danger to humanity, but as potential allies? Infesting only with consent?

“And what happens when there aren’t enough hosts?” I asked. “You can’t possibly have enough voluntary humans for everyone.”

He shrugged. “Then we go without.”

“And Mr Tidwell? Did he freely let you into his head?”

He blushed. “No. Not at first. Our relationship was more… typical, until I met Aftran. But it quickly became impossible to deny that she was right. I offered him his freedom. Instead, we reached an accord.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Right.”

“The point is, our position is not the status quo, it is considered dangerous, and the Visser has declared us… terrorists is probably the best human analogy. Aftran is the lynchpin of the organisation, but she has been found. Visser Three is currently off-world, but he will be back in ten days, and when he is, he will interrogate and kill her.” Tidwell – Illim – leaned forward. “Visser Three’s techniques cannot be resisted. If we are very lucky, he will be too enthusiastic and accidentally kill her before getting everything; but it is far more likely that she will tell him everything she knows. About your people, about my people, about anything else dangerous that she might have picked up.”

I felt the blood leave my face. “But she knows all about – ”

“Don’t tell me. The less we know about each other, the better. It would have been better for me not to see your friends at all, although I suppose that their identities wouldn’t be hard to deduce once I knew about you.”

“Aftran didn’t tell you about them?”

“Technically, she didn’t even tell me about you, except to say that you were involved and able to help. I was instructed to deliver this message to you, and only to you. She said that only you had proven yourself to her.”

That sounded right. That lined up with everything. But I couldn’t be sure. I had to be sure.

“She said you would recognise a code phrase...” he thought a few seconds. “She said it was ‘tit for tat’.”

I nodded, and relaxed a little. Even if he was an enemy, and they’d already tortured all the information out of her and this was an unnecessarily elaborate trap, that probably wouldn’t have come up.

“You don’t trust me,” Illim said.

“What you say makes sense,” I said, “but taking chances or making assumptions is very dangerous for us.”

He nodded. “I understand. I’m going to reach up to my face now. I don’t have any weapons.” He lifted his hand to his ear, and his eyes fluttered closed. I looked away as the gooey slug started to emerge from Mr Tidwell’s ear. A yeerk leaving a body looks super gross. Fortunately, it’s also remarkably quick; pretty soon, Mr Tidwell was sitting there, looking slightly dazed and startled, Illim sitting on the back of his hand. I tried not to stare.

“Are… are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. “It’s always a little disorienting.”

“And what he says is right?”

Mr Tidwell nodded. “We don’t have any way to save her,” he said. “We don’t have any way to kill her, either. If Visser Three can interrogate her...”

“And what about you? You let him in your head? He’s not making you do anything?”

“He is not. We’re allies.”

“Are you sure? I know yeerks can use blackmail and threats to – ”

He sighed. “No, I’m not being coerced.” He noted my unconvinced expression and continued. “Five years ago, my wife died. She was everything to me. I threw myself into my job instead; everything was about my teaching, about my students’ development. And then I found The Sharing. A lot of what they said made sense. They spoke about putting ourselves towards building a better society, about being a part of something greater, about how everyone had the strength to do anything because everyone could share their strength with others and rely on others in turn. I walked right into their goddamn hands. They prefer it that way, you know; it’s far easier to control a human who won’t fight, or who can at least be intimidated or reasoned into line. It’s why they’ve got this elaborate system – ” he indicated the school around us – “instead of just herding people en masse to a Pool.

“But I freaked out, like most do when they see alien mind control slugs for the first time, and once Illim got inside me he learned pretty quickly that he had no way to calm me down. What was he gonna do? The Sharing rhetoric, the you-brought-this-on-yourself routine, none of that was working. He couldn’t threaten to make my life worse, because I was already on the brink of suicide when I’d stumbled into the Sharing in the first place. He couldn’t threaten my loved ones, because they’re all already dead. He couldn’t threaten my students, because the Empire is already infesting those at the optimally determined rate and he didn’t have the power to change that anyway.” He gave a small smile. “I made his life absolute hell. And eventually, he stopped trying to fight back. He stopped trying to talk to me. And he even stopped trying to control me when we weren’t being watched, except to stop me from doing anything dangerous. It wasn’t until after a month or so of this that I learned he’d been talking to Aftran. While we were walking down towards the Pool, he explained his plan, how they were going to arrange things so it would look like I’d been reinfested and could walk freely out of the Pool complex and leave the city. He didn’t even need to ask about what I wanted – he knew I hated him, hated the yeerks, had grown to hate everything about this town and would have left months ago if someone hadn’t been physically controlling my actions and making me stay.”

“But you didn’t,” I said.

“Of course I didn’t. I asked him what made him think I was going to let him quit that easy. I told him that the Empire hadn’t been able to threaten me while he was working for them and it certainly couldn’t threaten me if he wasn’t. I told him if he really felt bad about all the enslavement and war and so forth, if he really thought that involuntary infestation was wrong, then he’d get up and fight to stop it, not sulk like a blind coward in a puddle of mud.” He shrugged. “He’s my best friend now.”

He lifted his hand back up to his ear, letting Illim slither in. I tried to look politely unbothered as I averted my eyes and waited for them to be done. It gave me a few moments to process everything I’d just been told. It checked out. Or, at least, it made more sense than a trap did. If this was a trap, it meant that Illim had something unbelievably major to threaten Tidwell with, enough to place his own life in his hands, and that Tidwell was a great actor, and that they already knew everything about Aftran, and that they knew about us but somehow this had seemed a better choice of trap than a dozen simpler strategies, and…

None of it made sense as an enemy strategy. The only scenario that made any sense was that the two of them were actually telling the truth.

“I can’t believe there’s actually a yeerk resistance,” I said.

“I can’t believe you’re actually human kids,” Illim said.

“We’re not all human,” I said.

“Well, no. That does explain a few things.”

“And the Empire aren’t close to figuring out…?”

“It’s been suggested, of course. There are a lot of theories about you. ‘Secret humans’ was popular at first, but Visser Three reacted… violently… to people doubting his expertise on andalites. He insisted that no andalite under Prince Elfangor would ever do something so dishonorable as share technology with a primitive species, and those who thought otherwise learned to stay quiet. There was a resurgence in the idea when David came onto the scene, because if he could figure out how to operate the device himself, perhaps other humans had, too? But nobody knew how he would’ve gotten hold of the device, and the possibility completely dried up on your last visit to the Yeerk Pool, where three separate andalites showed themselves in their actual bodies. Good work pulling that off, by the way. It’s cemented your identities as andalites in the minds of the ground forces.”

I just nodded. Allies or not, Tidwell and Illim didn’t need to know about Gonrod’s unit. I sat on a desk (I’d lowered the Dracon beam at some point, although I didn’t remember doing so), and brought my mind to the topic at hand.

“Okay,” I said. “Where is Aftran being held?”


	6. Chapter 6

By the time I caught up with the boys, they’d gotten Ax off school grounds; together, we coaxed him into a bird morph, updated the other Animorphs via thought-speak, and headed for the forest. I updated everyone on the yeerk situation.

<A Peace Movement?> Rachel asked. <Of yeerks who, what, ask pretty please before forcing their slimy bodies into your head?>

<Better than the alternative,> Tobias pointed out.

<You guys had a yeerk at your mercy who knew all about you, and you _let her go_? > David asked. <Whose absolutely moronic decision was that?>

<It made sense at the time,> Jake said sharply.

<Really? Well, at this time, it’s about to get all of us killed. So thanks for that.>

<The important thing is figuring out how to get her out,> Marco said. <This would be so easy if Erek was here.>

<When are the chee coming back, David?>

<In a week or two.>

<Hmm. They might be able to help, then. It’d be pretty tight, though.>

<And risk the Animorphs, Aftran, _and_ the chee, > I pointed out.

<Yeerks getting their hands on a chee could actually be worse than us failing this mission,> Rachel added. <If we don’t get Aftran, we have to flee and the yeerks don’t get to have their morality party, but if the yeerks had that tech...>

We took Ax to the barn. As soon as he demorphed, it was obvious that that had been the right decision. He started to develop a sheen of sweat almost immediately, and seemed to have trouble standing. We steered him into one of the old, rarely-used horse stalls.

“Marco, turn that tap on and fill the trough,” I said. “Jake, help me get one of his hooves in. David, Rachel, get that junk over there into a different stall; it doesn’t matter which one, wherever there’s room. Tobias, where are my parents?”

<Nobody’s nearby,> he reported. <Your mum’s car is missing. Your dad’s truck is still here, but I don’t hear him anywhere close by.>

“I’m supposed to sleep over at Rachel’s after the dance,” I mumbled. “They’re probably having a date night or something.” We got one of Ax’s hooves into the water and managed to sort of lean him against the side of the stall. “Marco; stethoscope and thermometer. Second drawer in the desk.”

“I should call Mom and cover for us,” Rachel said. “Or else she’s going to try to pick us up from a dance we’re not at.” She headed for the house.

“Me too,” Jake said. “Marco?”

“Nora was supposed to drive me home,” he said. “She’s chaperoning. If she notices I took off without even telling her – ”

“You have about half an hour before you need to fly back, then,” Jake said, nodding. “Cassie, what’s wrong with Ax?”

“How should I know? He’s an alien. He’s feverish and delirious, but I don’t know if that means the same thing in an andalite as a human.” I took the stethoscope from Marco, put it on, and searched for Ax’s heartbeat. After a few moments of futile searching I realised that I didn’t actually know where the andalite heart was, or what a normal andalite heartbeat sounded like, so I moved on to sticking the thermometer in his ear, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to ever record Ax’s normal body temperature. Well, his current temperature was ‘way hotter than normal’, which turned out to be ninety five point five degrees. That was a start.

“Ax,” I said gently. He turned one stalk eye on me. “Ax, what’s your normal body temperature? In Fahrenheit?”

<Fareneneneit?> He asked. Great, now he was doing mental echolalia.

I nodded. “In our degrees,” I tried.

<I am ninety one point three of your degrees,> he said, with sudden coherence. Then his stalk eye unfocused and gazed vacantly over my right shoulder.

Four degrees too high. I bit my lip. In a human, that wasn’t great; in an andalite, who knew? But judging by the sweat and trembling, it had to be at least as bad.

<Can you help him?> Tobias asked.

“With the fever? Probably. There are a few ways to break a fever that should work on anything capable of running one, no matter what the underlying physiology is. Anything broad enough to just focus on it as a feedback system is – anyway, the point is, I don’t know whether we should or not. Fevers exist for a reason; they’re a part of how your body fights infection. Trying to lower his temperature might make him sicker. Ax, do you know what’s wrong with you?”

<Nothing’s wrong with me,> he said. <I lined that strike perfectly. You were too busy showing off, Tormelin.>

“Who’s Tormelin?” David asked.

“No idea,” I said. “He thinks he’s somewhere else.”

“Hey, Tormelin did awesome out there,” Marco insisted. “What was wrong with him?”

Ax turned a disparaging gaze on him. <He was too busy trying to impress that female from quantum programming class to pay attention to his stance.>

“He thinks he’s in school,” Jake sighed.

“I can work with that,” Marco said. To Ax, he said, “Yeah, he should’ve been focusing on that big exobiology paper that’s coming up instead.”

Panic clouded Ax’s eyes. <Exobiology paper?>

“Yeah. The one you were going to do on humans, remember?”

<… Right. Yes. Of course.> He looked worried.

“Hey, you know what? I’m a human. I could totally help you out with that. But you have to help me with this homework problem, alright?”

Ax relaxed slightly. <What is it about?>

“Just a normal biology problem. We’re supposed to work out what might be wrong with someone who has...” he clicked his fingers at me.

“Right,” I said. “Um. Elevated temperature, sweating, delirium...” I checked the water trough, which was emptying steadily, “excessive water intake, bloodshot eyes, trembling muscles. In a juvenile male andalite.”

<Well that could be _anything_. >

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

<Oh!> Tobias cut in. <He recently had contact with other andalites, but they weren’t sick.>

Other andalites… Estrid’s custom virus. But no. No; there was no way she’d make something that could infect andalites. Not on purpose. And a mistake like that should be impossible, right? For an alien species?

<Contact with carriers,> he said dismissively. <All kinds of things can be carried. But they should have had their shots.>

“I imagine they would have,” Marco said. “They’re military.”

<Patient got it off someone else,> Ax mumbled.

“He can’t have. He’s been alone for ages.”

<Alone?> Ax fixed Marco with a fierce stare. <Stranded?>

“Yeah.”

<With grass?>

“Well, yeah.”

“Alien grass,” I clarified.

<Oh,> Ax said, closing all four of his eyes. He slumped against the stall wall. < _Yamphut_. >

“ _Yamphut_?” I pressed.

<Mmm. I’m going to sleep now.>

“No! No, dude, I need to get top marks for this,” Marco insisted. “I have to explain it. _Yamphut_?”

<Mmm. Trick question. _Yamphut_ or _tephun_ ; they want you to say _tephun_ because nobody gets _yamphut_ anymore. But that’s if you don’t know that _tephun_ was eliminated by grove-cheiftainess Sala… um, Sala… something... >

“Her name doesn’t matter,” I said quickly. “There are bonus marks for explaining how to treat _yamphut_. We need those bonus marks, Ax.”

< _Yamphut_ is usually dormant. But when it activates, it overloads _tria_ gland.> He looked at Marco and then at me, very seriously. <Make sure you say _tria_ gland. Getting the glands right is important for your marks. >

“Of course,” I said quickly.

<First symptom is fever. When fever reaches ninety two point two of your degrees, _syorin_ layer becomes inflamed and expands over _tria_ gland. Causes delirium. Then loss of zero-space connection. >

“That’s morphing and thought-speak and stuff, right?” Marco asked, frowning.

<Yes. When fever reaches ninety nine point six degrees, _cascalim_ reaction begins and pulls the body fever back down. Fever will eventually reach normal body temperature. >

I relaxed slightly. “And then the _yamphut_ problem is over?” I asked.

<No. The reaction stops the fever from killing the patient. But the fever kept the growth of disease organisms in the _tria_ gland at bay. With the fever gone, they can breed. _Tria_ gland explodes. Can I sleep now? >

“Soon, soon,” I said soothingly. “What does the _tria_ gland exploding do?” It seemed pretty obvious what it would do, but he was an alien, so maybe I was wrong…

I wasn’t. <Sepsis of brain tissue,> Ax said. <Then death.>

<How do we stop it?> Tobias asked.

<Cut it out before it explodes.> He tapped his head. <From in here. I have to...>

“You want us to give you _brain surgery_?!” Marco blurted. “Now?”

<Not now,> Ax replied indignantly. <You get no marks if the patient dies. Inflamed _sayorin_ layer, remember? >

“Right, right,” I said soothingly. “What do we do about the... the _sayorin_ layer?”

<Wait for it to retract so you can access the _tria_ gland. It goes down with the fever. > Ax fixed me with a suddenly clear, lucid stare. <After my temperature goes back down to ninety one point four of your degrees, you must extract the _tria_ gland as quickly as possible. Or I will die. >

And then he passed out.


	7. Chapter 7

The human Animorphs all went home. I treated Ax’s fever the best I knew how without trying to break it, showed Tobias how to use the thermometer and deal with any minor issues that might arise, and went inside. An hour later, I heard my parents pull into the driveway.

They were both dressed up, and Mum was obviously drunk, giggling and hanging off his arm. Dad would probably have been too if he hadn’t needed to drive. I couldn’t help but smile as they crashed into the house, spotted me, and started in surprise.

“Cassie!” Dad said, his face melting into a grin. “We thought you were at Rachel’s.”

“Change of plans,” I replied. “Rachel’s mum drove me home.”

“Did you have fun at the dance?”

“Yeah. It was interesting.”

“How was Jake?” Mum asked, before Dad shushed her.

“Go to bed, moonflower,” he mumbled to her. She kissed him on the cheek and sauntered off.

“Um, is something wrong?” Dad asked me, frowning.

I realised I had been staring at him. I quickly looked away. “No,” I said. “Just thinking about stuff. It’s been a long night.”

He nodded in understanding.

What I’d been thinking had been, _If I took you into the barn right now and showed you my sick alien friend, how would you react?_

I wasn’t stupid. The solutions to most of my problems were right in front of me. The bright, clear line, Marco called it; the straight line from A to B that neatly accomplished all of your goals with minimum risk. I’d never been very good at seeing it, myself, but it was hard not to see how the puzzle pieces I had right now fit together.

I had two problems – Aftran and Ax. Aftran needed our complete, undivided attention, or we were all at risk; if we couldn’t save her, we were going to have to take our families and run, and warn the chee, the Star Defenders, everyone. The others had to blame me for that; they had to. She’d been my friend, letting her go had been my risk. My responsibility.

In the barn, we had Ax. He was very sick, and he was going to need brain surgery. Nobody had said it, but it was obvious that every Animorph expected my hand to be on that scalpel. I was the animal person, the one who could give pills and set bones and knew what words like ‘sepsis’ actually meant. I was the one who everyone expected to know what to do with Ax – including myself. I’d started snapping orders as soon as we got into the barn without even thinking about it, and neither had anyone else. But I wasn’t a surgeon. Let alone a brain surgeon. Let alone an alien brain surgeon.

There, in front of me, was somebody who performed minor animal surgery about once a week. My patient was sleeping mere feet away from his operating room at that moment. My patient that he didn’t know about and couldn’t be allowed to stumble in on. But where else could we put Ax? Not in his scoop, where he was inaccessible and unprotected. The chee had a big secret underground meadow, but they were away, and David didn’t know how to activate the elevator thing to get down there. No; somehow I needed to keep this dedicated vet, this man who had actual experience with the tools I’d be needing to use on Ax, this man who we were relatively sure based on Tobias’ observation wasn’t an enemy (although my mother’s status was less certain), out of the barn. While also going to school and planning a Yeerk Pool raid to rescue my friend.

It was blatantly obvious what the right decision was. I had to take my father’s hand, confess that I had something big I needed his help with, and lead him over to Ax’s stall while my mother slept off the alcohol peacefully upstairs. I had to show him Ax, explain the invasion, explain Ax’s illness. Then I’d have a proper ally in the house and barn, one with far more animal expertise than me; one who had a far better chance than I did of saving Ax’s life. One who would henceforth carry the same secret I did, who would have to worry that his wife might be an alien slave, who would have to decide whether or not to take the risk to free her. Who would know that his daughter was always out there risking her life fighting aliens, and would have to spend every moment we were apart wondering if he would ever see me again. Wondering how many of his friends were his real friends. Wondering if the animals he was working to save were worth saving, if the yeerks were going to eliminate them anyway. Wondering how I’d lied to him for so long, and what else I might be lying about; what sort of things I’d done, what sort of things I might yet be capable of.

It was obvious, so obvious, what the right choice was.

I looked into my father’s eyes. He was tired, of course, but happy. He’d clearly had a long night, too.

Ax was already asleep, and not going anywhere. Nothing else was going to happen tonight. My father deserved one last night of peace.

“Good night, Dad,” I said, and went to bed.


	8. Chapter 8

The next morning, Ax’s temperature was ninety five point nine degrees. I gave him fresh water and checked his breathing and pupil dilation, although I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with that information. I should feed him, but I wasn’t sure how; all of the food we had on hand for ungulates was dry oats and hay. He couldn’t eat that. I should have taken him outside at night and made him walk around. If he could still walk the next night, I’d have to do that.

Dry sweat was caked through his fur. Handfuls of his top coat came away in my hands when I pulled, like a sheep’s wool breaking. I let the blue fur drift to the floor. I’d have to clean that up before my dad saw it. Unless I showed it to my dad. Like I was supposed to.

But I couldn’t do something like that without discussing it with the Animorphs first. It was all of our secret.

With Tobias’ help, I did all of the barn chores, and told my dad I’d done them so he wouldn’t have to go in. He’d be out all day at some rabies awareness campaign, so if I got home right after school, I should be able to keep him out of the barn until the next day. That would give me time to discuss the issue with the Animorphs. They had to see that we needed his help. They had to see that I couldn’t do brain surgery myself.

Everything had just been… too much lately. There were too many viruses in my life, andalite bioweapons and andalite natural infections and… why was it always andalites at the moment? No, that wasn’t fair – not long ago it had been Iskoort, which hadn’t had anything to do with andalites. Or us, really. It had been about the chee, or the isk and yoort, or possibly about the howlers. All three, most likely; Ellimist was like that. And Jake had died.

And we’d got him back. But I wasn’t losing another team member. I wasn’t going to watch Ax die.

I wasn’t losing Aftran, either. Aftran, who had given up everything for our small peace and, unlike me, hadn’t been pulled back into her old life by a fluke of biology. We were going to save her. Somehow.

On the way to school, I prepared my arguments on why we had to tell my Dad. On what I was going to say to them and, later, what I was going to say to him. I tried not to picture Dad’s face as he learned what his daughter spent her time doing.

‘Oh, yeah, I’m almost failing math because I keep disembowelling aliens instead of doing my homework. I’ll try to work on my priorities.’

‘By the way, aliens are real, and most of the ones here really really want to enslave us. Well, enslave you. They’re getting close to the point where they’re just going to start trying to kill me and my friends without even trying for capture, and when that happens things are going to get a lot harder.’

‘Hey Dad, remember when I was five and you told me that the blue in bird feathers and human eyes was an optical illusion and that no land animal was really, properly blue? Come into the barn and look at this!’

I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation.

But putting Dad on Ax duty meant that we could focus on Aftran, and protecting our own identities. That would be a lot harder than an awkward explanation given to my parents. That’s where I could be focusing my energy, but no matter how hard I thought about it, I just couldn’t figure out a way to get into the Yeerk Pool undetected. Fortunately, I wouldn’t be alone, and the other Animorphs were a lot smarter than me. I’d bet that, by lunch, somebody would have a foolproof, amazing Yeerk Pool infiltration plan.


	9. Chapter 9

“Toilets!” Marco announced, grinning broadly at the three humans and one puppy scattered around the grass behind the school oval. It was lunchtime. He waited several seconds for a reaction and then, when we refused to give him the satisfaction, just continued on his own. “I mean, the Yeerk Pool has humans in and out of it all the time. They must have lots and lots of toilets. So what we do is, we get a copy of the municipal plans or whatever for the plumbing of the city, and find out where the Yeerk Pool toilets are connected up. Then we go to the water tower and use eel morphs to travel down the pipes into the Yeerk Pool bathrooms, demorph, and we’re in!”

We all looked at each other.

<That,> David said, <is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard of.>

“We’ve done way dumber stuff,” Marco said defensively.

“No, I think he’s right,” Rachel said. “Because until now I’d say our dumbest plan was getting into that yeerk supply ship by swimming in their water intake pipe, and this is just an extended version of that plan, with more things that can go wrong.”

“That plan worked,” Marco pointed out.

“It shouldn’t have. I think we should just use Jake’s rhino morph to bust through a door before the gleet biofilter can do its thing and come out swinging.”

<Cassie,> David asked, <how far can an eel swim in two hours?>

“I have no idea,” I said.

<Well, if the answer is less than the length of pipe between the water tower and this bathroom, then it’s kind of a moot point anyway.>

“And where are we going to get plans that include the Yeerk Pool on them?” Jake asked. “That stuff is not going to be filed with the council.”

“I’m more concerned about how we’re going to get into the water tank, because the pipes leading to those tend to be pretty narrow,” I said, “and then out of the water tank. Turning from an eel to a human in a small plastic or metal box full of water and metal bits doesn’t seem wise. Taps and so forth have a similar problem.”

Rachel nodded. “We should just use the rhino to – ”

<That plan is worse,> David said quickly.

“Well what’s your idea?”

<There’s got to be some way to just fool the biofilter,> he said. <It reads DNA and stuff, right? That thing that our superpower is based on? Can’t we just acquire controllers?>

“We’ve tried,” Jake said glumly. “Doesn’t work.”

I shuddered at the memory. That Yeerk Pool trip had not been a fun experience.

<We should’ve kept that alien red box thing.>

“I tried,” Jake said with a shrug. “Gonrod and Estrid weren’t hearing it. Andalites take Seerow’s Kindness very seriously.”

<I bet we could’ve stolen it without them noticing.>

“Not likely.”

<Are you kidding, man? We could steal anything. We should be international art thieves. I’d charm everyone with my little puppy face and take their art with my little puppy hands.>

“Puppies don’t have...” Rachel began, then trailed off. David was indeed growing human hands.

“David?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“Control yourself, dude!” Marco hissed. “You’re at school!”

<Pffft, I don’t go to school,> David mentally mumbled. <School is for losers. I’m a fuckin’ superhero.> He flopped sideways onto the ground, panting and staring at nothing.

I leapt to my feet. “I’ll handle this,” I told the others. “Make excuses for me in class.” I scooped up the half-dog monstrosity and jumped the school fence, looking for somewhere concealed and hopefully less full of yeerks. We ended up in the shed of a house that had no cars in the driveway.

“David!” I hissed urgently, trying to keep my voice low. “David, focus. You can’t demorph in public!”

<Mmm… now?>

“Yes, you can demorph now.”

He did. I looked him over, His skin was flushed, his eyes glassy.

I sighed. “You have a fever. We need to get you home, but you’re the number one missing child in the area, so we can’t just walk. I need you to focus, okay? Focus. Can you become a bird?”

“Which one?”

“Right now it doesn’t matter. Just your favourite bird morph.”

He nodded, frowned, and started to shrink again. I made sure the shed door was unlatched and could be pushed open, then started to morph myself. Soon, an eagle and an osprey were in the air, looking suspicious as hell to any bird watchers. I put some distance between us and coaxed him to stay in morph long enough to land in the Kings’ backyard.

<Okay,> I said, after determining that we weren’t being watched and landing beside him. <You can demorph now.>

As soon as we were human, I fished the spare back door key out of its hiding place, picked him up, and carried him to bed. I was painfully aware of his sweat on my skin, his breath in my breath – disease vectors. I dumped him in bed and went looking for what I needed.

Despite being robots, the chee had a well-stocked first aid kit. I took his temperature – he had a fever, but he wasn’t dangerously hot – and coaxed him to drink some water. He was mostly responsive, but somewhat delirious. He seemed to think he was in some kind of fancy hotel, and kept apologising to me for breaking in, which I ignored once it became clear I wasn’t going to dissuade the delusion.

I gave him a jug of clean water, raided the chee pantry for whatever snacks were easiest for a weak, delirious sick boy to eat, and took a very long, very hot shower, even though I knew it was pointless – if whatever David had was in his sweat or whatever, I either already had it or I didn’t. If it was on his breath, no shower would help.

I made myself a cup of tea. Then I sat in the impossibly clean kitchen, and tried to get myself together.

Okay.

Ax was sick with some kind of alien disease that required surgery. The details of the disease’s function hadn’t seemed to matter and I’d been too concerned with getting him to tell me how to fix it to pay much attention. That seemed like a grievous error now, because David was showing identical symptoms. Which meant. Which meant.

I had no idea what that could mean.

Four possibilities for David. First possibility: a really volatile flu or something was going around, and it interacted badly with morphing capabilities. Unlikely – we would have noticed others getting sick. Second possibility: David was doing something shady with his morphing powers off-the-clock and had caught some weird disease. That, I wouldn’t put past him. I didn’t think he’d be going full-on jewellery thief, but he might be betting people he could eat broken glass or something, and some fragment of glass was still inside him and had… cut something… that caused a fever? No, no; morphing would have healed that. But he still might have picked up something off doing something shady.

I tried to recall if any Animorph had been sick since gaining the power. I didn’t think so. Not counting Rachel’s morphing allergy, of course.

Okay. Option three. _Yamphut_. This seemed like the most likely answer; his symptoms were identical to Ax’s. It also seemed biologically impossible. Viruses have to be extremely specific in their function; most of them can only infect a very narrow band of species. Ax, no matter how much he looked like one, wasn’t a mammal; he wasn’t related to Earth life at all. The chances of an andalite virus being able to infect humans were absurd; it was as if…

As if an andalite could come to Earth and eat our grass and not be poisoned; as if hork-bajir could eat our bark; as if multiple alien species could breathe the exact same air without difficulty; as if yeerks, aliens who evolved to infest the brains of another alien on their homeworld, could come to Earth and infest ours without problems…

Hmm.

Nevertheless, viruses are more specific than any of those things. An andalite virus shouldn’t be able to infect a human, I was pretty sure. Which led to option four – a virus that had been deliberately engineered to infect multiple species.

Had Ax touched Estrid’s black egg? Had David?

The possibility seemed absurd – Estrid would have made absolutely certain that her virus couldn’t infect andalites, I was sure of it. There was no way she’d risk unleashing a bioweapon that could attack her own people. But then, biologists do make mistakes. Could you accidentally let a virus infect an alien species like that? I didn’t know. I didn’t have the information. I had only a basic grounding in how viruses infected humans, let alone aliens. I didn’t have the information to solve this! Nobody on Earth did!

I finished my tea, checked on David, and made another cup.

I was looking at this whole thing backwards. My job wasn’t to solve a medical conundrum. My job wasn’t to find out what had gone wrong here. My job was to keep everyone alive as best I knew how. For Ax, that meant keeping him hydrated, monitoring his temperature and, eventually, getting my dad to perform brain surgery on him. For David, it made no difference whatsoever where his illness had come from, because it obviously wasn’t something common-knowledge that was going around, or at least not something that was infecting other victims in the same way – and that meant that the world’s best doctors probably wouldn’t be able to do anything to fight it anyway. Whether it was terrestrial or extraterrestrial, whether he’d gotten it from Ax or Estrid or in a shady alley or from some kid who sneezed on him during a mission, the result was the same; his immune system was going to have to fight it on its own. I had to keep him alive while it did its job, and stop the infection from spreading.

I relaxed at the thought. This was the sort of thing I knew how to do. I had two patients. Both needed fairly constant care, and both should ideally be quarantined. Tobias was looking after Ax, but the chee were in Egypt and couldn’t watch David, and all the other Animorphs (me included) had school and covers at home and so forth. The best solution would be to bring both patients to the same location, where Tobias could watch them, but we were short on locations to do that. The hospital was of course completely out; it was crawling with yeerks who desperately wanted both David and Ax, and knew them by name. There were the guys guarding the andalite toilet out in the desert whom I was sure would love to interact with a Real Actual Alien, but if we gave Ax to the government I had my doubts that we’d ever get him back. Besides, we had a deal with the yeerks that both sides would leave that place alone, and if we didn’t stick to our deals it would be impossible to make new ones in the future.

That left our own more familiar locations. Putting a sick human in the barn seemed dangerous for his health, and Ax’s meadow would be dangerous for both of them. I wasn’t taking a delirious Ax to the King house; the area was far too populated, and if something went wrong he could blow their cover as well as ours. This would be so easy if the chee were around – they could take Ax underground, watch both of them secure in the knowledge that they were immune…

But they weren’t around. And the next best solution was obvious. A vet, the knowledge, the tools, an easily quarantined location…

I had it all planned out. I’d tuck David into my bed and be waiting for Dad when he got home. Then I’d show him Ax and Tobias and explain the situation. I’d explain it simply, leaving out most of the war stuff; that could come later. Once he’d gotten over that, I’d show him David and explain the situation we had. At this point, Dad should go Full-On Biologist and be ready to quarantine everything right away; he’d want to call Mom, at which point I’d have to cut in and explain the yeerks, because we weren’t completely sure about Mom. So we’d have to use more deception, cutting the phone lines, removing the radios, and confining her for three days while Dad looked after the patients and did the surgery. When we saw what happened to David, learned more about his virus, then we’d know better how to move forward.

And the rest of us Animorphs could focus on rescuing Aftran.

But I hadn’t spoken to the Animorphs about letting my father in on things yet. I’d been going to, but we’d been discussing Marco’s plan, and then David had gotten sick… we didn’t need him until the surgery. An introduction to the alien war should be carefully planned. This little illness with David wasn’t any reason to rush things.

I had other connections I could use, ones that didn’t involve completely destroying my home life quite yet. I kept an eye on David until about forty five minutes after school. That should be long enough.

I half-morphed an old woman to disguise my voice. Then I picked up the King family phone, and dialled.

“Hello, you’ve reached the Chapman residence,” Mrs Chapman said wearily.

“Hi,” I said, “can I speak to Melissa, please?”

“Mm. Melissa! Phone! She’ll be right down.”

The loud footsteps of someone thundering down stairs. The rustle as a phone passed from hand to hand.

“Hello?” Melissa asked.

I had to do this carefully. The King phone, I knew, was one hundred per cent secure. Star sixty nine wouldn’t work on it, and caller ID would give a random number. The Chapman phone, on the other hand, was almost definitely bugged.

“Hi,” I said. “You might not remember me; we met up after school that one time right before Jeremy Jason McCole came into town? You stopped us because you thought my friend looked like your friend Rachel, and you gave us some fashion tips and showed us that cool trick with that doctor’s tool?”

Silence stretched out. Then Melissa said, “Of course I remember. What can I do for you?”

“We need help from your doctor friend. We made friends with this new kid in town a little way back and now he’s sick but I don’t want to take him to hospital because he, uh, doesn’t have health insurance. Right?”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like. Where is he now?”

“Safe, but not forever. Can we meet up?”

Silence again. I knew what was going through her head, because I’d had similar thoughts dozens of times. She had to be wondering if this was a trap; if someone had found her out and was using her to find out the identity of her doctor friend. Why else would I be using the phone instead of thought-speak? Infesting her for the information would set off alarms, because Chapman’s yeerk was protecting her as part of his deal with Chapman, but if they could convince her to just tell them the information…

I waited for her to replay the conversation in her head. Waited for her to note all the little details from our previous meeting I’d put in there, that nobody else would possibly know unless they’d already infested me (in which case they could just thought-speak). Finally, she said, “I’ll tell my friend you’re dropping by,” gave me an office address, and hung up.

There. Perfect. I felt the relief wash through me, draining every bit of strength I had into the floor. I sagged into a chair. Problem solved.

For now.


	10. Chapter 10

Jake and Rachel dropped by to check on David soon after, and I handed the doctor’s office dropoff over to them. I had other jobs. I checked on Ax – ninety seven degrees exactly – and then turned my mind to the next immediate problem.

My father. Until I could organise with the other Animorphs to bring him into the fold, I needed to keep him out of the barn.

I had about forty minutes before Dad would get home. I used the time to feed and medicate the animals, clean the barn, and unlock and open my bedroom window. I checked my route three times, checked the cover I’d have, checked that I could do everything silently. I found the easiest-to-put-on clothes I owned – a pair of old sweatpants and a loose tshirt – and laid them on my bed. I headed down to the lavender bush in our yard and waited until I heard the rumble of an approaching engine. Then I closed my eyes and focused on the skunk within me.

Dad strode towards the house, whistling jauntily. He twirled his keys in one hand and carried a briefcase in the other, like some 1960s caricature. I waddled out of the bush into his path and peered up at him with my big shiny skunk eyes.

Dad froze. He’d had a bad experience with a skunk in the past and was very wary of them. That, in fact, had been what had given me this idea. But he didn’t run screaming or anything; he was a professional, he still handled skunks regularly. He knew their behaviour better than I did; he knew that a skunk was harmless if you left it alone. He knew that it wouldn’t turn around and raise its tail until it felt threatened. He knew that even once it did that, it was just a warning; you still had a few seconds to back off. All he had to do was walk around me, and later talk at dinner about how there was a skunk in the yard for some reason.

But I didn’t have to obey the skunk rules of chivalry.

As he took a step back, I spun and raised my tail, tip down. Alarm barely had time to register on his face before I raised that tip and sprayed him once, twice, three times.

He stumbled backwards, crying out, and fell over. Which brought his face into musk range.

 _Sorry, Dad_ , I thought, and sprayed him thrice more.

“Aaaargh!” Dad scrambled to his feet and bolted for the house. As he jiggled his key in the lock (I’d locked the doors), I waddled back into the bush and demorphed as quickly as I could. This process was more unpleasant than I’d anticipated; as my human senses emerged, it became clear just how terrible the yard around me smelled now. I heard Dad barrelling into the kitchen, searching the cupboards. Fully human, I silently darted for the tree next to my bedroom, climbed it quickly (not caring about any bumps or scrapes), slipped into my window, and threw on my sweatpants and shirt. Then I rubbed my eyes red and stumbled down the stairs, looking as sleepy as I could.

“Dad?” I pinched my nose shut with one hand. “Why does it smell like dead raccoon in here?”

“Do we have any tomato juice, sweetie?” Dad asked, distracted.

“How would I know? Wait, is this skunk musk?”

“There’s one in our yard. It sprayed me half a dozen times.”

“ _Again_?!”

“Tomato juice, Cassie. Do we have any?”

“I’ll call Mom and get her to pick some up on her way home. I already did the animals, by the way.”

“Good. Thank you. They won’t like me going near them until this is gone.”

“We don’t have very many right now,” I said soothingly. “I can handle the barn stuff for a few days.”

He smiled, looking relieved. “Sweetie, I could hug you right now, but...”

“Rain check, yeah?” I called Mom and relayed the problem. When she’d finished laughing herself sick, she promised to pick up a lot of tomato juice on her way home.

Right. That little crisis was averted.

Time to talk to Ax.


	11. Chapter 11

Ax was awake when I went into the barn. He even looked a little healthier; his eyes were sharper, and he was standing up. This, I knew, was an illusion. Bursts of energy were not uncommon in feverish sicknesses.

“Hi, Ax,” I said. I flicked my gaze up to Tobias, questioning.

<Nothing major has happened in the last hour,> he reported. <It’s mostly been boring, actually.>

Ax greeted me with a weak hand gesture.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

 _Hot_ , he finger-signed at me. _But better than cooling down_.

“When the sun goes down, we’ll go outside and get some grass, okay?”

Ax’s chest and shoulders shook with silent laughter. _Ha, food. Too late. I was not_ – (several quick finger signs I didn’t understand) – _and now the brain is_ – (more untranslatable signs).

“Hey, slow down, Ax; I can’t understand you. Thought-speak, okay?”

Ax shook his head and tapped his temple. I bit my lip. Right, right – the _yamphut_ shut down the zero-space connection. So no thought-speak or morphing.

Probably a good thing, I decided. Having my parents woken in the middle of the night by hallucination-induced telepathic screaming would be… awkward. But it did make my current mission a little more complicated.

“Ax,” I said, “can humans catch _yamphut_?”

He frowned, puzzled, and gave a negative gesture. _No_ tria _gland_ , he added.

I sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. David’s sick. He’s been showing a lot of the same symptoms as you, so I was hoping it was this instead of, y’know, Estrid’s supervirus.”

Ax’s eyes widened with sudden realisation. He gave multiple rapid gestures, none of which I understood.

I glanced at Tobias. <Beats me,> he said.

“Ax, Ax. Beginning language student here. Can I have that slowly, without technical lingo?”

He nodded, took a few seconds to assemble his thoughts, and tried again. I read the gestures aloud as he made them, to be sure I was getting it right.

“’ _Yamphut_ travels’. No, sorry; ‘ _yamphut_ ’s… travelling thing’? What’s a – ‘ _yamphut_ , disease travel’ – oh! Yamphut’s infective agent, right? Okay. ‘Yamphut’s infective agent moves through thought-speak-thing; morph-thing’… zero-space, right? Yamphut’s transmission vector is zero-space. So you’re saying, anyone who uses zero-space can catch it? Including us? ‘Narrow? What do you mean ‘narrow’? Oh, not anything; a narrower category. ‘Needs… mental anchor’. You’ve spoken of that before. It’s how we can think human thoughts and use thought-speak and stuff when in morph, right? So anything that can morph has one? And we spread it by using that anchor; by morphing or using thought-speak in proximity to other carriers. Okay. Got it.” Well, that complicated things. We were going to have to morph if we wanted to rescue Aftran. But on the plus side, at least it wasn’t Estrid’s thing.

“Ax,” I continued, “what’s going to happen to David? Does he need surgery?”

Ax tried to give a complicated explanation again, and once again I teased the simple version out of him. It was hard to be certain what the infection would do, because it had never infected a human before. But the brain-swelling and exploding _tria_ gland were secondary symptoms specific to andalite physiology; the disease triggering other things in the andalite body. Theoretically, David should just get the fever, delirium and eventual shutdown of his zero-space link until his body recovered. If his body recovered. Humans hadn’t exactly evolved in concert with zero-space diseases, so it was hard to be sure whether our immune system would fight it successfully. His immune system did at least recognise it as an invader; he had a fever, after all. But that didn’t tell us whether he could get rid of it or not.

Humans died of fevers every day.

  



	12. Chapter 12

“I’m just saying,” Rachel was just saying. “Rhino. Straight through the gleet biofilter room. Charge in, grab the yeerk, charge out.”

Rachel, Jake, Marco and I were walking to school. Well, technically, we’d walked to school, seen far too many people loitering about to talk openly, and gone to a park about a block away from school, which was empty.

“Something more subtle might be safer,” Jake said.

“We don’t have time for subtle,” Rachel pointed out. “Not if we can all come down with this morphing disease at any time.”

“I’m pretty sure we can only come down with it if we morph,” I said. Then I frowned. “At least, I think so? I could be wrong. My andalite sign language isn’t very good.”

“So we have a limited amount of morphing, then,” Rachel said. “And we don’t know how limited, because we don’t know how much exposure is too much. We need to keep this direct and simple, and deal with this security threat so that we can focus on Ax and David and whichever one of us falls ill next.”

“Actually,” I said quietly, “there might be a… way to balance all that stuff.” Everyone looked at me expectantly. I swallowed. I could feel my hands getting damp; there was a cramp in my gut. This was the moment; there was nothing in the way, no reason to put it off any longer.

“My dad,” I said, taking the plunge. “We’re pretty sure he’s not a controller. He’s currently got an alien in his barn that’s way too complicated to hide; he knows so much more about biology and illness and patient care than I do and Ax is going to need brain surgery, you guys; I can’t do brain surgery, that’s insane, but – ”

Rachel put an arm over my shoulders and cut me off. “You want to tell your dad?” she asked.

I nodded, my cheeks reddening. But nobody immediately rejected the idea. They looked thoughtful.

“We’re less sure about your mom,” Marco said. “Might have to isolate her for a few days. But it can be done.”

“It would certainly be useful to have adult allies in Cassie’s house,” Jake added. “We could meet in the barn all the time that way; we wouldn’t have to be so careful hiding Ax… and the more animal knowledge we have at our disposal the better. Plus, if they’re anything like Cassie, learning about aliens will blow their minds. They’d do whatever they could to help Ax and the hork-bajir colony and all that.” He met my eyes. “But if we do this, your father’s not going to want you out there risking your life on missions and stuff. You understand that, right?”

“He can want what he likes, but he can’t exactly stop her,” Rachel pointed out.

“There’s no reason he has to know all the gory details,” I said. “At least, not right away. We can turn into animals, we fight body snatchers, this alien friend of ours needs brain surgery. He can think we just… spy and do warehouse raids or whatever. He doesn’t have to know there’s actual killing involved. But he can look after Ax and David and anyone else, which frees up Tobias to work with us, so we can rescue Aftran. And if we rescue Aftran before any of that comes up, great; he can focus on Ax’s surgery.”

Jake nodded. “I feel bad making a decision like this with only four of us seven present, but...”

“Four’s enough to sway a vote if it’s unanimous,” Marco said. “I’m in if Cassie’s cool with it. It’s a war, and we need useful allies.”

“Me too,” Rachel said, nodding. “We can discuss it with the others later, and if they have any major objections we can talk about it then.”

“I think we should go ahead as well,” Jake said. “So that’s four for yes, and we can ask the others later.”

He hadn’t, I noticed, asked for my vote. But that made sense; I’d been the one to raise the idea in the first place. I swallowed again; my throat was really dry. The start of a fever? _Yamphut_? Or was it emotional? Was I conflicted over this?

Didn’t matter. I couldn’t do anything about either of those possibilities. Things were going to happen – my dad was going to lose his innocence, and I was probably going to catch an untreatable alien disease. Time to accept the facts and move on.

“So after school, we talk to the others and do this?” Jake asked.

“We might want to wait a few days,” I said. “I had to… take drastic measures to keep Dad out of the barn while Ax is in there.”

I explained. Everyone laughed. Marco made an unfunny joke, and distantly, the school bell rang, telling us that we were all going to be late. It was as normal a morning as the Animorphs ever had.

Before we had a rebel yeerk on our hands. Before my father learned the truth. Before we might die of an alien disease.

Before everything was going to change.


	13. Chapter 13

Ax’s temperature after school was ninety eight point four degrees. In one point two degrees, his body would resist the fever to prevent it from killing him, and it would start to fall. When it fell low enough, it would cease being effective in fighting the _yamphut_ , and the disease would start to win. It would keep falling, and there would be a very narrow window of time for my dad to cut into Ax’s head and extract the _tria_ gland before it exploded.

When Ax recovered and could morph again, would it grow back, ready to catch the disease all over again? Or would it be like Rachel’s piercings, always there even though they should technically count as injuries?

All of the Animorphs minus David were in the barn. It was Friday night, so for just a couple of days, we didn’t have to fit school into our schedule. Making it prime mission time.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Jake said, shaking his head, “but Rachel does raise some good points. The fact of the matter is, we don’t have any better ideas.”

“Exactly!” Rachel exclaimed. “That’s what I’m saying! Every time we find some new way to sneak in, they upgrade their security. But what are they going to do against a charging rhino? Put big metal armoured doors on every single entrance? I don’t think so. We barrel in, start a fight, have a second team find this yeerk in all that confusion, get her, barrel out.”

“This is the worst plan ever,” Marco remarked.

“Think of it this way,” Rachel said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Every time we have to go down to the Yeerk Pool, we end up getting found and causing a huge scene where we have to fight our way out by the skin of our teeth. And claws. But this time, that’s the plan! We’re going in already knowing the outcome! You have an advantage!” She grinned at him, eyes bright.

“Wow, I feel so much better,” Marco said drily. “Have you ever considered being a motivational speaker?”

“Can a rhino even fit down those tunnels?” I asked.

“Barely,” Rachel said. “It’d be a scrape, but he’ll fit.” She glanced at our surprised expressions. “What?”

“You measured the tunnels?” Jake asked.

“Not, like, really accurately or anything. But I had a look last time we went down, with Estrid. I figured there was a good chance we’d be fighting our way out and you might need to be a rhino if trampling was going on, and I wanted to know in advance if that was going to be a problem. Turns out no, it’s not, if you don’t mind tight squeezes. And once we’re through the door you can demorph a little bit anyway if you have to.”

Marco nodded thoughtfully. “This is probably the time for it, too,” he said. “Not this attack, this is insane. But the best time to be doing _something_ , before someone else gets sick. The yeerks saw two of ‘us’ die recently – Aloth and Arbat. They also now know that two of ‘us’ are kids running around with less adult supervision than before – Ax, and now Estrid, and she was a girl and the yeerks presumably know how andalites feel about girls. If we go in there with a slapdash plan and four people, that’s not going to look suspicious, but if any more people fall before we make our move, they’re going to notice that something is wrong. Or suspect that the others are hanging around as backup or something, which might be a useful bluff but is probably just going to make them trigger-happy.”

“So you’re saying we should go now,” Rachel said.

“Hell no. You’re all more delusional than Ax right now. We want to do as little fighting in that hellhole as possible.”

I glanced up at Tobias. He was avoiding thought-speak as much as possible to try to avoid the disease. I didn’t know if that would matter or not since he was a _nothlit_ ; did his body count as being “in morph” so far as zero-space went, or not? But we couldn’t get any more information out of Ax, who was unconscious, and it was best not to take chances.

Whatever he thought, he was keeping it to himself. It’s pretty easy for a hawk to keep their body language unreadable.

“Vote, then,” Jake said, “on whether we storm the Yeerk Pool… let’s say, tomorrow?”

“We can’t do tomorrow,” Rachel said. “Tomorrow uncle George and aunt Ellen are coming onto town for Grandpa G’s thing next week, remember? We have to go to a family dinner and,” she raised her fingers in sarcastic quotation marks, “’be sociable’.”

“Aaargh, I forgot about that,” Jake groaned, rolling his eyes. “Their kids are insufferable.”

“We haven’t seen them in like a year,” Rachel said with a shrug. “Maybe they’re nicer now.”

“Maybe we’ll all die on this mission and you won’t have to risk finding out,” Marco muttered.

“Right,” Jake said. “Tonight, then? Everyone free tonight?”

I nodded, as did Marco, somewhat reluctantly.

“Okay,” Jake said, “let’s vo – ”

“I think we should go for it,” Rachel said immediately.

“I think we shouldn’t,” Marco responded.

They looked at me. I looked at Tobias, who was preening a wing. He met my eye and then looked meaningfully at Ax. I frowned.

“Tobias will need to keep an eye on Ax,” Jake pointed out. “He’s not coming, and you know how he feels about voting on missions where he’s not coming.”

I sighed. “What’s your vote then, Jake?”

“After you.”

“No,” I said. “You always do this. You stand back and let everyone else vote so you never have to. If you’re sure of a decision you always just announce what we’re going to do, and if you’re unsure it’s like ‘hey, let’s vote, let’s be a democracy’, so it’s the rest of us who have to make the complicated decisions while you skim the easy ones.”

Everyone looked at me in surprise.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m just tired.”

“Are you okay?” Rachel asked.

I glanced at her, remembering a speech Jake had given me a while ago, about how as the leader, he wasn’t allowed to let anyone see him be afraid. He wasn’t allowed to break, to drop the facade. There was more leeway for the rest of us, but that was true for all the Animorphs, in a way. There was too much going on right now for me to be distracting. So I swallowed and nodded.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just worried about this sickness, and for Aftran. But I still want to know what Jake thinks.”

We locked eyes; his narrowed, mine wide and innocent. He broke first.

“I think,” he said, “that we need to be decisive. For once, battle is not the biggest threat to us right now. We cannot let Visser Three interrogate that yeerk; that’s a time limit. We also have this sickness; that’s another time limit. And I know none of us want to think about it, but we still don’t know how dangerous it is. As I see it, we only have two practical choices right now; prepare for best-case, or for worst-case. And we have to pick one and commit to it one hundred per cent or we don’t have a chance. The worst-case, that we’re not going to be able to pull this mission off and that we might all die; well, if that’s what we think is going to happen, then the logical thing to do is roll over right now. Tell our families everything, pull them all out, hope the chee return in time for us to warn them, and wait together with our families, hidden somewhere, to see if we get sick, to see if we survive.

“Now; are we prepared to do that? Are we prepared to risk the chee, to risk this new yeerk rebel movement, to pull our families away from their lives and make them either watch us die sick, or wait for us to possibly not return after every mission from an isolated location? Because if we’re not, then the only other practical solution is to aim to win. To believe we have a chance at this rescue. To believe we might survive this. And that’s going to involve taking risks. If we’re going for it, if we want to win in this situation, we need a plan that’s simple, clean, and fast. And Rachel’s is the only one we’ve got.

“Yeah, we might die in a yeerk tunnel. We might die of fever, too, or of ambush when that yeerk tells Visser Three all our secrets. This situation has moved beyond a dying-in-battle level of risk. I think we should go for it.”

Marco looked desperately to me. “Cassie. Save us. Tie the vote. He won’t make us do it if you tie the vote.”

I had been on Marco’s side, actually, but Jake had made some extremely good points. I shook my head helplessly.

Marco groaned, covered his eyes, and flopped backwards onto a bale of hay.

“Woo!” Rachel whooped, punching the air. “Let’s do it!”


	14. Chapter 14

Tobias found us the most isolated Yeerk Pool entrance he could; through the bathroom attached to a gas station on the edge of town. The lock on the bathroom door was broken (possibly to make the Pool more accessible to controllers), so we didn’t even have to enter the shop.

The bathroom was too cramped for all of us to morph at once, so Tobias found the security cameras and we loitered in their blind spots like the world’s worst-dressed teen gang while Jake put on his rhinoceros. I had the smallest battle morph present, so I squeezed in to go leopard and give him some backup if anything went wrong while he lined up with the back of the stall, lowered his head, and charged.

_Craaash!_

The toilet shattered, sending splinters of porcelain everywhere. Water spurted from where the little pipe had been ripped from the wall. Jake plunged through, then plunged through the wall, into a small metal chamber; with a bit of a push, he tore through the small metal chamber and into a tunnel that sloped sharply downward.

“Probably could’ve come through the side and avoided the biofilter completely,” Marco noted, peering in. “The station attendant probably heard all this, you know.”

“Then hurry up and morph!” Rachel hissed, ducking into the bathroom that was rather more spacious now that it was devoid of one toilet stall and one rhinoceros.

<I’ll handle the attendant,> I said, stepping around them.

I moved around the two of them into the doorway while they ducked into the tunnel to finish morphing. Jake hadn’t stopped to wait; the longer it took us to get down the tunnel, the more resistance we could expect. The station attendant flung the door open and found himself face-to-face with a leopard.

My heart sank a little. He looked like he was still in school. Sixteen, maybe. His eyes locked on me and all the blood drained instantly from his face.

<Hi,> I said. <I don’t want to hurt you, okay?>

He nodded numbly. Terrified, but not confused by the thought-speak. A controller. Made sense.

<Have you raised the alarm yet?> I asked.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

<If you don’t attack me, I won’t attack you,> I said, trying to sound reasonable. <Have you raised the alarm?>

“I just… I came to check out the sound and… oh, god, I don’t want to die.” He collapsed to his knees and started crying. I felt a rush of irritation. This alien, this invader, was puppetting the body of some poor highschooler who had no business being involved in any of this. He’d steered this poor kid into a dangerous situation, thrown him on the mercy of the yeerk’s enemies, and was in hysterics over the possibility that he, the yeerk, might die.

But there was no time for that kind of indignation; Rachel thought-spoke to me to inform me that they’d almost finished morphing.

<I’m going to go now,> I told him. <Do not follow us.> I bared my teeth to make the point, then dashed into the tunnel.

I had to move fast to catch up with the others. A leopard’s no wolf when it comes to distance running, but they hadn’t moved too far ahead. We kept up a brisk pace; the rhino taking up the entire tunnel, the gorilla and grizzly loping on all fours behind him, and the leopard, bringing up the rear. We’d been moving for about five minutes when we heard the explosion.

I didn’t know what it was at first. The sound reverberated around us, a sonorous roar through the stone. <Look out!> Jake warned quickly, backing up; the rest of us hurried to backtrack without getting crushed by each other. I ducked under his legs to see what the problem was.

There was very little light in the tunnel, but leopards have great night vision. It was enough to tell that the tunnel ended where it shouldn’t. It was blocked.

The tunnel had caved in. No, been caved in; that boom hadn’t been natural. Someone had blown it up. I stared. With all the fancy spaceships, the biofilters, the laser guns, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that the yeerks might stop us with something as primitive and direct as just collapsing a tunnel.

<Time to go,> Marco said. <They know we’re trapped in here. The longer we take to get out, the bigger a resistance we’ll have to face.> He was already motoring back down the tunnel. We followed suit. Jake was slowed by his need to demorph slightly to turn around; I hesitated to wait for him, but he goaded me forward.

<Even if I’m too slow, you can protect me better from outside the tunnel than trapped in here with me,> he pointed out. He was right. I sped up.

Then the tunnel entrance collapsed, leaving us in total darkness.

For a solid three seconds, nobody moved. Then;

“RAAAAAAWR!” The bear’s roar reverberated through the tunnel.. Something started clawing at the walls.

<Rachel!> Jake snapped, sounding close to panic himself. <Chill!>

<There’ll be more space in here if we all demorph,> I suggested. Truthfully, I wasn’t worried about space. I was worried about half a circus’ worth of panicked animals turning each other into paste.

<How much air is in here?> Rachel asked, still scrabbling at the wall. <Are we going to suffocate?>

<There’ll be more air if you’re a human than if you’re a bear,> Marco pointed out with uncharacteristic gentleness. <Focus, Rachel. Xena: Warrior Princess isn’t going down like this.>

We demorphed. Soon, I was on my hands and knees on a dirty cave floor, in the dark. I found Rachel and put my arms around her, and we waited a minute or so to see if Jake was going to tell us what to do. He didn’t.

“Cassie,” Jake said, “are any of our morphs really good at digging?”

“Not _that_ good,” I said. “It’d take weeks to get out, and we’d probably crush ourselves under all that rubble in the process.” Rachel stiffened. I pressed her forehead into my collarbone. She was sweating in fear, which is saying something when it comes to Rachel, her forehead a warm point in the chill air of the tunnel.

“We won’t need to wait weeks,” Marco said. “The yeerks will dig us out soon enough.”

“Who says they won’t leave us here to die?” Rachel muttered.

“If they wanted to kill us, they would’ve collapsed the whole tunnel onto us,” Marco pointed out. “They collapsed it to keep us out of the Yeerk Pool, and the other end is probably to delay us long enough for their forces to arrive. They want to capture us alive.”

I did a quick mental inventory of the resources we had on hand. It wasn’t much. Morphing anything but your own body requires a supreme act of self-delusion, and none of us had managed it for anything more complicated than money, bits of paper, or our own morphing outfits. We mostly just had our array of morphs, none of which were useful for this situation.

It was then that we heard something digging through the rubble at the tunnel’s entrance.

The yeerks were ready for us.


	15. Chapter 15

Fear was an ache low in my gut. The sounds of excavation continued. We had nowhere to go.

“I have an idea,” Jake muttered. “But there’s no time to explain. Everyone needs to morph ticks.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Marco asked.

“Marco and I don’t have tick morphs,” I said.

Jake considered this. “Cockroaches will probably work fine,” he said. “Everyone’s picked those up by now?”

I nodded and started to morph.

“Why?” Marco asked. “What’s the plan?”

The yeerks weren’t bothering to be quiet in their excavation. The tunnel shook, and a little dirt fell from the ceiling onto my face.

“No time,” Jake said.

“Bullshit. I’m not going to – ”

“Marco,” Rachel said through gritted teeth, “is this really the time for this?”

“You’re all crazy,” he muttered. But I heard the sloshing and bone-snapping of morphing begin from his direction.

As I shrank, I could hear Jake moving around. I wasn’t sure what he was doing until his fingers encountered mine in that darkness; he took my wrist and placed my hand on his forearm. He was trying to keep track of us, so we wouldn’t disappear into the dark dirt as cockroaches.

Outside, the yeerks were still working to get in as quickly as they could. Our tunnel began to lighten just as my vision dimmed too much to make use of it. I’d clung to Jake throughout the morph, and he’d been morphing too, but the rough skin under my cockroach claws didn’t give me any real clues as to what he was. He scooped the three of us up in one inhuman hand.

<Okay,> Marco said, <we’re morphed. Now what exactly is – >

<Quiet, I need to concentrate,> Jake said, and we were moving. The hand around us tightened until he was very almost, but not quite, crushing us; the firmest, most protective grip he could maintain without hurting us. And then…

Static, in every sense. White noise, white light (even though I knew very well I shouldn’t see any light, clenched in a fist as I was), the tingle of pins and needles that I was pretty sure cockroaches shouldn’t be able to get. It washed over me, and then it was gone but it wasn’t easy to move on from. We were moving very fast and things were very noisy, but all of that seemed very far away. As the white fog rolled through me a second time I wondered, vaguely, whether I was dying. A strange pressure squeezed my right side; an illusion that –

No, not an illusion. Jake’s fingers had been wedged slightly open; there was light. One of the cockroaches beside me was growing, changing shape.

<Whoever’s demorphing, get a grip,> Jake said, sounding distracted. But the cockroach kept growing.

<Hey,> Marco said. <Roach, remember? You’re supposed to be teeny.>

That meant it was Rachel. But I didn’t want to speak openly and embarrass her, so I addressed my thought-speak to her alone. <Hang in there, Rachel,> I said. <You’ve been through worse than this before, and you made it. All we have to do is sit tight.> Sit tight in a very cramped space and rely on someone else to save us. Yeah, that was pretty much the opposite of Rachel’s style.

<I need two minutes,> Jake said.

<You can hold on for two minutes, Rachel,> I continued, resisting my natural tendency to ease into general coaxing and trying to sound a little more authoritative. Rachel was kind of like a dog when she was distressed; if you were too eager to comfort her, it just convinced something inside her that there really was something wrong. <You’re a survivor,> I added, figuring the Xena: Warrior Princess moniker wouldn’t be useful here. It was what Marco called her when she was confrontational and reckless. We needed the opposite of confrontational and reckless.

Rachel didn’t respond. I don’t know if my words helped or not. But she stayed small enough for Jake to hold until the noise died down and Jake dropped us in the dirt, telling us that it was safe to demorph.

I did so immediately, and was surprised to find that for once, I hadn’t demorphed the fastest. We were in a small copse of trees just outside of town – nothing like the national forest, more like a bit of land that nobody had bothered to develop because it was kind of isolated – and Jake sat a little ways away underneath one, his back to us. He looked unusually still.

“Jake?” I asked. He didn’t respond. Was he in some kind of shock? It couldn’t be physical shock; he’d just demorphed. I crawled over and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t respond, but the faint shake in his shoulders told me everything I needed to know, even before I saw his face.

Jake wasn’t responding because he was busy. It was taking every bit of his focus, every bit of his will, not to cry in front of the other Animorphs.

I pondered my next move. I wanted to hug him, and he probably wanted to be hugged, but I knew that if I did that there was no way he’d be able to hold back the tears. Jake’s mask of stoicism still seemed kind of silly to me, but it was important to him, and as I’d learned the hard way with Rachel, that sort of thing wasn’t up to me. So instead, I drew my hand away.

As my fingers trailed between his shoulder blades, they jerked back involuntarily, and it wasn’t until an instant later that I realised why as electric pain shot all the way up my forearm. Gritting my teeth against the onslaught, I forced my arm to obey me and pulled my hand close enough to inspect it in the moonlight. It took a little while to find the problem; the two stiff white hairs whose pointed ends had embedded themselves in my fingertips were very thin, and had to catch the moonlight just right to be seen.

I tugged them out carefully, and the pain subsided to a dull ache. I recognised the sensation, of course. They were Howler hairs. They must have come out during the battle and settled on Jake’s clothing when he demorphed.

I looked at Jake again, noticing for the first time the blood streaked up his right arm, coating the hand that hadn’t been full of cockroaches, and slicked up his shins.

“Jake,” I said quietly, “are you – ?”

“I’m fine,” he lied through gritted teeth. After a moment, he added, “But I am never fighting in that morph ever again.”

I nodded, and made a mental note to teach Jake the breathing techniques that Dr Johnson had taught me to calm anxiety later, when he was in a more stable mood. For the moment, I wasn’t sure whether to back away or press on. Either action could upset the stable equilibrium he was striving for, but I couldn’t awkwardly hover forever.

The decision was made for me when, behind me, I heard the unmistakeable sound of somebody throwing up.

We both spun to look at the fully demorphed Marco and Rachel. Rachel was on her hands and knees, breathing hard, while Marco held her hair back, murmuring something to her. Even though she’d only just demorphed, beads of sweat were already forming on Rachel’s forehead, gleaming in the moonlight.

I silently cursed myself for not paying more attention. I knew there was a bug going around in our little group, and somehow I’d still been caught by surprise. Marco had been right; Rachel’s plan had been a bad one. Her judgement had been compromised. Her bright eyes, her feverish energy… I headed over to help as Rachel retched again. I had assumed that Marco had been murmuring comforting platitudes, but as I got closer, I was proven wrong.

“… Vomiting, of course,” he was saying. “Hurling. Tossing your cookies, a classic. Ralphing.”

I gave him a look and took Rachel’s hair from him. But he didn’t go away.

“So many ways for such a simple human action,” he marvelled, in what was clearly supposed to be an Ax impression, but was terrible. Then he switched back to his normal voice. “Cascading. Blowing chunks. Spewing your guts. Tangoing with the toilet,” he added reflectively, “that’s a good one. Technicolour yawn.”

“Marco,” Rachel gasped, “if you don’t shut the hell up I’m going to – ” She was interrupted by, well, insert your favourite term for throwing up here. Then she looked up at Jake, who had strolled over, and gave him a grin. “I guess you’re going to have to deal with Saddler and Forrest on your own tomorrow,” she said.

“And Brooke and Justin,” Jake said, crossing his arms. “I won’t forgive you for making me deal with all four.”

“Brooke is okay.”

“Brooke is a brat.”

Marco and I stayed out of the Berenson Pretending-We’re-Doing-Okay charade. I’d never met these cousins of theirs, anyway, and had no data to contribute on whether or not Brooke was a brat. But Marco was glancing at the moon, then around us through the trees, and I knew what he was thinking. The yeerks had probably given up, knowing how easily we could disappear once we were out of sight… but there was a chance they were looking for us, and we should move.

Rachel seemed stable for the moment, so I stood up, brushed off my knees, and helped her to her feet. She tried not to lean on me too obviously. I could feel her shivering.

I glanced between the two Berensons who were now, by accident, flanking me. Jake, who had just had some kind of extremely traumatic experience and might need help unpacking and processing it; if I didn’t draw it out of him, he’d push it far down with everything else he thought a leader shouldn’t be bothered by, where it would fester. Rachel, who had caught an alien disease that caused fever and delirium, and was far from home, with yeerks quite possibly still searching the area.

Jake’s problems could wait. Rachel’s couldn’t.

“I’ll get Rachel home,” I said. Jake nodded. I could see him already mentally dismissing us, already filing Rachel’s crisis away as temporarily resolved and pretending his didn’t exist at all, already looking for new plans to extract Aftran with just three Animorphs, probably wondering whether he should pull Tobias off Ax-watching duty to pull the numbers up. Marco looked hard at Jake, and then at me, trying and failing to be subtle as he checked for signs of flushed skin or sweat; finding none, he skimmed the sky, and started to morph.

And I, in the back of my mind, started scripting what I was going to say to Rachel’s mother, assessing the risks that she might be taken to the hospital (low; Rachel’s mom was a busy person, and if Rachel played her sickness off as a cold she’d just be sent to bed), whether I should give Rachel sedatives to eliminate the risk of suspicious chatter in her delirium (no, I decided; if her mother couldn’t wake her, she definitely would end up in the hospital). Mind racing, I took my friend’s hands and coaxed her into her last morph for a while, so that she could fly home.


	16. Chapter 16

When I woke in the middle of the night, there was blood between my thighs. The sight of it sent me into a panic as I ran through the symptoms of _yamphut_ , trying to figure out whether internal bleeding could possibly factor in as a symptom. We didn’t know what it did to humans, really; maybe there was something in my DNA that reacted worse than the others, maybe it was fatal to me in some horrible way. That was a rare thing in humans (usually, population-specific vulnerabilities to viruses were due to a lack of exposure rather than anything genetic), but not unheard of – black Africans and their descendents were unusually resistant to yellow fever, for example, and people with the blood type O were more resistant to the bubonic (and pneumonic) plague than other blood types. I didn’t exactly know the ancestry of my fellow Animorphs, but the mere fact that they were all white or half-white except me meant that they almost certainly all had more genetic similarity with each other than with me. Or maybe it was a more exotic reaction. I’d had more vaccinations than any other Animorph, I was pretty sure, because I worked with animals; maybe the _yamphut_ virus caused an immune reaction in me that was eating up my cells and –

It was a mark of how on-edge I’d been that I ran with these sorts of thoughts for a solid minute before recognising what was actually happening. I knew how menstruation worked, of course; my parents had never been coy about biology with me, especially when it came to my own body. I’d been expecting to wake up like this for a couple of years, but being an Animorph had mostly pushed such things out of my mind. My body changed so much from day to day that the concept of puberty had seemed negligible; inasmuch as I’d thought about it, I’d mostly had academic questions about whether morphing would affect my development. We could all see in each other that we were ageing no matter how much we morphed, but I wasn’t sure how my constantly-morphing body was going to deal with a monthly hormone cycle. I’d been wondering whether I was going to bleed at all (and in a related question, ever be able to have children), knowing that if the answer was no, I wouldn’t know definitively for several more years. In the war, something so far in the future seemed too irrelevant to bother worrying about.

But now I did have a definitive answer. And the relief that came suggested that the question had bothered me more than I’d thought it had. I drew my legs up, put my forehead on my knees, and started to cry.

I cried in relief for a little while, and then in worry and stress. This was a complication. One that was going to be very awkward and very difficult to make the boys understand. I’d been experimenting a lot with morphing, and I was almost certain that I wasn’t going to be able to morph a menstrual pad. They were too bulky, and there was no way I’d be able to convince myself that it was part of my body. That put me out of commission for three to seven days per month, and for the first year or so, I wouldn’t be sure which days they were going to be. At some point, Rachel was going to have the same problem. It wasn’t insurmountable, but I couldn’t stand the thought of being sidelined for something so trivial. Not when we needed all-hands-on-deck so often.

I’d have to think on it. Find a solution. One more question answered, one more puzzle to solve. I went downstairs and took two tylenol for the cramp in my belly, then tried to go back to sleep, with limited success.

Even with tomato juice, it would still be at least a couple of days before my dad would want to go into the barn and risk disturbing the animals, so I got up extra early to do all the barn work. Running the barn was technically a full-time job, but a lot of that was administration and meetings and callouts, which I didn’t have to deal with. I wanted to get as much done as possible early in the morning so that Mom wouldn’t come in and try to help me.

Tobias flew off to check on a few things while I worked, and came back with news – Rachel and Jake were both in bed with “the flu”, and according to Melissa, David’s temperature was stable and well within the range that humans could tolerate. It was hard to be sure with a new virus, but it seemed that with adequate care, _yamphut_ wasn’t deadly to humans. Or not to David, at any rate.

Of course, that was assuming that his immune system could eventually beat it. Nothing to do about that but wait and see.

Ax’s temperature was ninety eight point two degrees. Lower than last time. That could just be meaningless variation, but given the significant time since I’d last checked, it was probably on its way back down. I’d been graphing his temperature against time but there didn’t seem to be a neat curve; it had risen in fits and starts, and would probably fall the same way. That would make timing the operation difficult. I should tell my Dad sooner rather than later, and let him prepare. Right after the skunk thing wore off, I decided, would be a good time.

The weekend passed without any Animorph meetings. The only Animorphs left were Tobias, Marco, and me; Tobias was in the barn watching Ax, and Marco or I would contact each other if we had an idea for rescuing Aftran. It seemed that neither of us did, and we were running out of time.

It was on Sunday afternoon that I entered the barn and greeted Tobias, only for him to eye me blearily for a few seconds and then fall off his perch in the rafters. He reflexively used his wings to slow his fall, but still hit the floor pretty hard, belly-first. I clicked my tongue and picked him up. He flailed halfheartedly in my grip, more disoriented than violent, but I’d handled a lot of sick birds of prey in my time and we’d all held Tobias occasionally; I kept myself clear of his beak and claws as I inspected him for broken bones.

“It’s okay, Tobias,” I murmured. Nothing was broken, but he was quite lethargic, which was why he hadn’t lacerated my arms into shreds accidentally. His feathers were all puffed up, which could mean several things for a bird. Usually it meant aggression or alarm. When combined with lethargy in a safe place, it meant fever.

I put him in one of the big bird cages.

<But I can’t stay in my room, Aunt Mina,> he mumbled. <If I miss any more school I’ll get in trouble.>

“It’s okay, Tobias, I called the school and told them it’ll be fine,” I murmured, distracted, as I filled out a chart with his symptoms.

<That’s what you said last time,> he said. <But they still...> he broke off as he fell asleep. I gave him some food and water, and considered medicating him, but decided against it. Usually, Dad decided what medications to give the animals; I just handed out what was on their chart. I could probably make Tobias more comfortable by helping him sleep or lowering his fever, but without knowing how well his body would fight against _yamphut_ , I didn’t want to go messing about with his body’s defense mechanisms. If the fever got dangerous, I’d do something. Until then, I’d let Tobias handle it.

Another Animorph down.

It was just Marco and me now.


	17. Chapter 17

I knew that Marco and I shouldn’t sit together at school. So far as outsiders knew, the social glue that held us together was Jake, and Jake was out sick. But I saw him in the lunchline several people behind me, eyes bright, hands trembling, skin flushed, and let the people between us go on ahead so that I could mutter, “You’re sick. Go home.”

He shook his head. “I can hang on long enough,” he said vaguely. He looked distracted, twitchy.

“You’ll space out mid-miss – in the middle of everything,” I said. “A lot of people did.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“That’s what they all thought.” We were gaining a couple of looks, but there was no way anyone could gain anything suspicious from what we were saying. If need be, we could spin it into any number of high school drama stories. “Go home.”

“You’ll be alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“And what if you lose?”

“Then you need to be ready.” _Ready for my signal to extract your family_ , I meant. I didn’t dare be more specific. I hoped he understood.

His gaze flicked to my eyes, and he looked at me with sudden, perfect clarity. “And what if you win?” he asked, very seriously.

I tried to understand what he meant. Maybe he was already delirious. If so, he couldn’t be here, at school. “Go home,” I urged him.

He nodded sharply, stepped out of the line, and left. I was debating whether to follow him and make sure he got home okay when somebody tapped my shoulder. I jumped, and looked up at Mr Tidwell.

“We need to talk about the Spanish party,” he said.

I nodded and followed him into an empty classroom. He locked the door behind us. We moved to the middle of the room, where we could talk quietly and be absolutely certain nobody outside would hear us.

“Problem?” I asked.

“A big one. How goes the rescue?”

“We’ve hit a lot of… complications.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me the details, then. Look, our schedule has moved up. A lot. Visser Three is coming back early to interrogate Aftran. Apparently certain high-ranking yeerks have a small gap in their schedule and would like to bear witness.”

“When?”

“Wednesday night. Nine o’clock.”

I felt a chill settle in my heart, and an ache in my body that had nothing to do with bleeding. This was pure dread. Fifty seven hours. I had fifty seven hours to rescue Aftran. From the Yeerk Pool. From multiple high-ranking yeerks. All by myself.

And if I failed, the Animorphs, the chee, the Star Defenders, and the burgeoning Yeerk Voluntary Movement were all in extreme, immediate danger. And even if I succeeded, I’d have to get out alive, or Ax would die soon after.

Thirty three hours. One Animorph.

I looked into Mr Tidwell’s eyes. I met Illim’s gaze.

“I’m on it,” I said.

Somehow.


	18. Chapter 18

On Tuesday morning, Ax’s temperature was ninety seven point five degrees. I still had a while.

I was waiting for the bus when a teenage stranger sidled up next to me. Spiky black hair peeked out under his hoodie, his blue eyes barely visible behind thick but stylish glasses. Alarm bells immediately went off in my head; the bus stop was pretty remote, and there shouldn’t be any strangers there.

“Hey,” he said.

I relaxed, recognising the voice. “Hi, David. Nice look.”

“Well, I’m still on milk cartons, so...” he shrugged.

“You look better,” I said.

“Yeah. Still a bit feverish, but the doctor says I should be fine. I came by to tell you that the chee are coming home on Friday. Erek didn’t sound very happy; I don’t think their mission went well.”

Friday. Too late to help.

“Cassie,” he added, sounding worried.

“Mmm?”

“I can’t morph.”

“What?”

“I still can’t morph. I tried.” He bit his lip. “I’m still recovering. Like, I still can’t sleep, my skin is still hot, so maybe it just hasn’t come back yet, but – it will come back, right?”

I tried to keep my expression calm. That wasn’t a possibility I’d considered. The sickness shut down the zero-space connection or whatever, or the body did to defend itself, but would it stay that way? Would that heal, or would it be permanent ‘damage’?

“I think it’ll come back,” I said, trying to sound sure. “Ax would have mentioned it otherwise. But even if it doesn’t, we still have the _escafil_ device, so we can give it back to ourselves.”

He nodded, reassured. The rumble of the school bus engine crept into my awareness, and David retreated into the trees before it crested the hill and came into view.

I was glad I’d been able to reassure David, but the truth was, I wasn’t so sure that he – that any of us – would be able to morph again. Ax had been feverish and explaining the disease to me through a communication barrier when I’d told him about David’s sickness, and I’d been mostly concerned with whether people were going to die, so the recovery process hadn’t really come up. And we did have the _escafil_ device, but that might not mean much. I knew from conversing with Ax that you couldn’t give a _nothlit_ the power to morph again by re-exposing them to the _escafil_ device, so it was pretty unreliable to assume that such a thing would work on us.

That was a later problem, though. I had far too many things to worry about to stress out over hypotheticals I couldn’t affect. I mentally prioritised, like Dr Johnson had taught me, dismissing anything not relevant to my immediate problems (for now) and anything I couldn’t affect.

There was a lot going on, but nearly all of it was irrelevant. The only two things I needed to worry about right then were Ax’s upcoming surgery and Aftran’s rescue. I already had a plan for the former. So my immediate concern was Aftran’s rescue.

I couldn’t fool the Gleet Biofilter; even in morph, going through without the right Controller/yeerk pair triggered an alarm. And I couldn’t barrel through the biofilter; if Friday night had been any indication, they had alarms for that, too. And if such a remote tunnel had been wired to cave in to trap invading andalites, all the other tunnels probably were, too.

Okay. So. What did I have to work with?

Chee? No. Other Animorphs? No. Star Defenders? Theoretically yes, but I couldn’t see how they’d be useful. Free hork-bajir? Same answer.

I spent the whole day puzzling over it, getting absolutely no schoolwork done. The fear of getting sick and then never being able to morph again, although I’d dismissed it as unimportant for the moment, was lurking in the back of my mind. The human mind is pretty uncooperative when it comes to logical principles. Every time my mind drifted, it snapped to the memory of a dream, waking up on a beach unable to morph. A mostly unproductive day, although I did find a solution to my morphing period probem. I’m not going to explain because it’s extremely personal. The only person who needs to know is Rachel, who’d be needing the solution herself at some point.

I took sedatives that night. I’d been good with them, and hadn’t touched them for more than a week, but I couldn’t afford to be tired the next day. The next day, I had to come up with some last-minute amazing plan to save Aftran, and pull it off.

My last-minute amazing plan came to me in last period. I was in math, staring vacantly at Ms Robinette, wondering how she’d feel if she knew that so many of her coworkers were being puppetted by alien invaders. Despite Mr Tidwell’s claim that all of the teaching staff were controllers, I knew that Ms Robinette was free unless she’d been taken extremely recently – she was dating Marco’s father, so we kept a close eye on her. She was one of the ever-dwindling number of people in the school who, like me, couldn’t pass through the Gleet Biofilter.

I glanced down at the math problem I was supposed to be solving, got halfway through, and immediately forgot what I was doing. Yes – I could get through the biofilter. I knew exactly how I was going to do it. It was perfect, flawless.

Since that night in the construction site with Elfangor, I’d done a lot of weird things. I’d fought to the death in ant tunnels, raised skunk babies, and performed surgery in the Australian desert. I’d blown up an alien continent, swam into a sea monster’s gill slits to do damage from the inside, and carried my friends underground in my mouth as ticks. But this… this would be something special.

This would be, without a doubt, the absolute grossest mission I’d ever gone on.


	19. Chapter 19

After school, I left everything in my locker, turned into a bird, and followed Mr Tidwell home. His kitchen window faced his backyard, relatively concealed – I landed on the sill, waited for him to come into the kitchen, and gave it a tap.

<It’s me,> I said. <Can I come in?>

He glanced around before levering open the window. I landed on the floor; he hurriedly drew the curtains and closed the door while I demorphed.

“We’re alone,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. Ospreys have pretty good hearing.” I stood up and met his eyes. “I have a plan.”

His face sagged in relief. “Oh, good.”

“I need your help.”

“What can we do?”

“You’re going to hate it. Probably more than I do, and man do I hate it. It’s a reliable plan, but...”

“Cassie, both of our lives are on the line here, and so are a lot of our friends’. What can we do?”

I took a moment to assemble my thoughts and ignored the stab of guilt. There were a lot of variations on the plan, and some of them were a lot more dangerous and invasive to both Illim and Mr Tidwell than others. The version I was about to propose was the worst version for both of them, and very unpleasant for myself, but it was the one that gave me the most control, and as the only Animorph in play at the moment, that was important.

“Illim,” I said, “can a yeerk survive outside a head and outside a Pool for a few hours?”

“Certainly,” he said. “Dehydration is a major risk, but so long they were in an oxygenated liquid, they’d be fine.”

“Does it need to be a specific kind of liquid?”

“Yes, but not one difficult to find on Earth. Anything from pure to brackish water would work, short-term.”

Good enough. I told them the plan. To my surprise, they agreed immediately.

Mr Tidwell rummaged through a drawer next to the sink with his left hand while he held his right to his ear. As Illim extruded himself from his host’s ear canal (gross), he withdrew a ziplock bag from the drawer and, one-handed, half-filled it from the tap.

“When he’s gone, I always feel, I don’t know, empty,” Mr Tidwell said conversationally, as if that wasn’t the creepiest thing ever. “Like a piece of me is missing, you know?”

Then he held his hand out to me. He held Illim out to me.

I swallowed, and reached forward. Very lightly, being careful not to hurt the delicate yeerk, I lay two fingers on his skin and willed his pattern, his essence, into my body. He felt basically like I expected him to – a giant slug, albeit without very much slime, having just exited a human head.

Mr Tidwell gently tipped his friend into the bag of water while I concentrated on the new DNA within me. It was an extremely difficult morph, not because of its difference to my normal body – a yeerk was no more different from a human than a Leeran was – but because the motivation was very difficult to find. Deep in my soul, my psyche, there was absolutely nothing that wanted to become that thing. Who would want to be a yeerk?

Well… yeerks did, until Empire propaganda taught them to hate themselves. Aftran had been comfortable in her body, and she had a culture shared by thousands, maybe millions, of people in similar bodies. I pulled up those memories from months ago where she’d shared her perspective with me; a perspective I couldn’t really understand, because I’d had to filter it through my own human mind and human experience. My friend’s inner world that only a yeerk could properly understand.

I began to shrink.

My skin turned slick with a thin coat of mucus. It oozed from every pore and filled my ears. My nose. My mouth. I felt my throat close over as slime filled my lungs. If this had been in my first year or so of being an Animorph. I probably would have frozen there, but I’d long since learned that once you couldn’t breathe you were racing time until you could, and had to push through. That reflex took over.

My skin smoothed out into the soft, silky sheen of yeerk skin. My eyelids disappeared, and I was glad I didn’t have a mirror to see what that looked like.

Mr Tidwell looked away. I couldn’t blame him.

I kept shrinking the whole time, limbs merging with my body and bones disintegrating. The aching need for oxygen disappeared, suddenly; I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I was probably breathing through my skin.

The last thing to go was my sense of sight. My eyes melted into the soft, silken mass of my boneless body, and the world was dark.

I was a yeerk.

I wriggled a bit. Apparently I could schloop forward along the floor, although not very fast. Some experimentation with my senses revealed that the air smelled unpleasantly acrid (I supposed that was probably because it was dry), I could feel every imperfection in the floor tiles through my belly, and apparently I could echolocate. The resultant picture of the world was pretty detailed, but very close-range. I couldn’t wait to give it a shot in liquid, where it would probably work better.

All in all, being a yeerk wasn’t very different to being a Leeran. There was a similar sort of sliminess to the body, similar breathing apparatus, and equally strange ways of ‘seeing’. Being a yeerk was a bit like being a Leeran who was very small, and technically blind, and barely mobile, and defenseless, and instead of using their mental powers to create an open society safe on their home planet they had to push their way into people’s skulls and had started stealing people’s bodies and forcing them to –

I was dithering, because the next part of the plan was the worst part. I couldn’t detect the huge human fingers descending toward me until they were a couple of inches away. They closed around me, very gently, and I felt every ridge and whorl of Mr Tidwell’s fingerprints as he gently lifted me to his head. To his ear.

Whose insane idea had this been again? Oh. Right.

This was a part of the plan that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Partly because the idea of being in my math teacher’s head, and partly because it was unnecessary. Technically, Illim could pilot Mr Tidwell while I waited in the ziplock bag. But the idea of sitting blind, in a bag, trusting allies of dubious reliability to move me around, set off alarm bells in my head.

I echolocated and the ridges of the external ear jumped out in my awareness, surrounding Mr Tidwell’s ear canal. I reached out, took hold of the edges of the canal, and pushed myself in.

The yeerk knew what to do. I automatically squirted a numbing solution out ahead of me from… somewhere. Illim’s exit hole was there in the eardrum, smaller than a pinprick; smaller than I thought a yeerk had been capable of squeezing. I extruded the very tip … nose?… of my body through the hole, and used a tendril of my own flesh to navigate the way into the brain.

I bunched up my internal organs, and squeezed them through the tiny hole without moving the outer skin, like an octopus. Schloop! This way, I was able to move most of my body very rapidly through a small space without causing any friction damage.

As I pulled the tendril in behind me, I was already spreading out over the brain, flattening into the crevices. The brain cavity is full of fluid and over pressurising it by putting an entire yeerk inside should be pretty uncomfortable, but I didn’t recall any such problems when Aftran was in my head, so I figured that Mr Tidwell was probably fine.

The yeerk instinctively knew how to interface with a brain. It didn’t know, as I did from my own studies, that the vast field of ridged flesh beneath it was the cerebral cortex, responsible for conscious thought and the processes that supported it; it didn’t know that the fist-sized section at the back, the cerebellum, was responsible for involuntary processes. But as I lay down and melded myself with Mr Tidwell, it knew where to connect and where not to. The cerebrum responded properly to my touch, synaptic impulses being copied into my own body and translating as coherent data; the cerebellum gave me white noise, and I pulled away from it. I leeched oxygen from Mr Tidwell’s blood, data from his mind.

Said data wasn’t immediately easy to make sense of. There was about a minute of experimental crosstalk, where flashes of images and thoughts appeared in my mind in no coherent manner and his fingers twitched as his eyes stared at nothing. But my yeerk senses soon figured out how to ‘translate’ his mental activity.

My world exploded with color! The vivid red and white of the tea towel hanging down the front of the shiny silver stove. The rich brown of the coffee ring on the lusciously cream-coloured countertop. Humans are a fairly sight-dependent species, but for all my morphing, I hadn’t realised just how sight-dependent we were until I experienced Mr Tidwell’s sight, and it felt like my sight, despite my blindness.

I understood how yeerks, without the opportunity to experience other species’ senses first-hand like I could, might grow addicted to this.

But my experience of being Mr Tidwell wasn’t limited to his senses. I was instinctively searching for the way to control his limbs and consciously searching for ways to make sense of what was going on, and I was blundering into all sorts of stuff. Memories, mostly – sitting in a car and laughing with a young woman, failing a history test as a child, sitting on a bathroom floor with half a bottle of alcohol in one trembling hand. There was no way to avoid them, because I couldn’t see them until I blundered into them; I was running blind through a mental forest, searching for any way to navigate. There were private thoughts, too, which I did my best to ignore until I found one directed specifically at me.

<Is everything going okay, Cassie? Do you know how to control my body?>

I looked at my hand – Tidwell’s hand. I clenched it into a fist. Relaxed it. It seemed to work.

<Are we ready to go?>

We were, but I was already hating this mission. I searched futilely for a way to think at Tidwell for a few seconds, before realising that I didn’t need to communicate with him like a yeerk. I was perfectly capable of thought-speak.

<This is my least favourite morph,> I told him. <I think I hate this more than being a termite.>

My mind flooded with Tidwell’s amusement. <Why were you a termite?>

<Had to get through a forcefield. Long story.> I took a few steps forward with legs that my instincts told me were mine, and my conscious mind told me were not. Ages ago, back when we were new to morphing, I’d been really wary of morphing sapient animals. I’d been worried that it’d be like creating, and then controlling, an actual person; that there might be a mind in there to fight with, that fighting to make a cockroach walk into the light might translate into fighting a conscious dolphin or human or monkey mind that would be aware of its lack of freedom.

Such fears had turned out to be unfounded, but infesting Mr Tidwell was the exact experience I’d been fearing back then.

<You’d be a lot better at this than me,> I told Tidwell. <How about I just sit here and not interfere?>

Tidwell seemed amused by this, but I didn’t go digging to find out why. <Alright,> he said, picking up the ziplock bag and closing it most of the way, leaving a gap to keep Illim’s water oxygenated. He went to the back door and took a large overcoat off a hook. He shrugged it on and slipped Illim into one of the broad pockets.

It was more difficult than I’d expected to not take control. It was sort of akin to lying perfectly still; it worked fine for a minute or so, before your face started to itch and your legs became restless. As Tidwell got into his car, fished his keys out of his pocket, and turned them in the ignition, it was all I could do not to do it myself; so far as my senses could tell, those keys were in my hand, and some involuntary reflex was moving them around.

We drove back to school. There were a lot of people about, but for once I felt no fear moving among them – Mr Tidwell was here regularly. He was expected.

It wasn’t Illim’s night to use the Yeerk Pool, but we didn’t attract any strange looks as we headed for the gym and into an unusually crowded storeroom. There were several people who, strictly speaking, weren’t supposed to be there. Normally, out-of-schedule visits to the Yeerk Pool were frowned upon, but tonight was a special occasion; tonight, a traitor would be interrogated and their terrorist organisation filtered from the Pool, and there would be an audience of Empire patriots, rank-climbers, and those who just loved a show. Everyone who was anyone would be there; everyone who wanted to be anyone would be there.

There were so many people trying to get through that they were entering three or four controllers at a time. We stepped into the understated door that had been concealed behind a stack of gym mats with an old woman and an indifferent-looking teenager who I’d seen about the cafeteria but didn’t know. The Gleet Biofilter warned us that the scan was about to begin.

To be read by the biofilter, a yeerk would usually have to stick part of their body out of their host’s ear. Otherwise, only the human would be read, and the controller would be detained at the end of the tunnel on suspicion of being an andalite infiltrator.

I didn’t have to worry about that, though; Illim, in his little bag of water, was easily scannable. The biofilter detected no problems, and soon, we were in the tunnel.

We walked in silence. I wasn’t sure what was more worrisome; that Mr Tidwell was fairly inured to the screams and protests wafting up from below, or that I was.

The Yeerk Pool looked pretty much exactly as it had a couple of weeks ago. The ditch being dug into the stone that would become a second pool was a little larger than last time, and there were more people around. The cafeteria had chicken nuggets, which I supposed was a sign of advancement. I could still see the burn mark on the stone where Estrid’s shredder had vaporised the virus as Arbat had dropped it into the pool. The biggest difference was the pedestal in the centre of the room, with a large space all the way around it.

The structure was clearly temporary, but it was still grand. A sixteen foot wide circular platform of brushed aluminium stood about a foot high, surrounded by hork-bajir guards. From the centre of the platform raised a single vertical pole, with patterns of straight, crisscrossing lines painted on it in red. It reminded me a bit of the _takta_ pole that Ax had found on Leera, telling us where to find the andalites in the Leeran city, but the hatched patterns weren’t andalite letters. Tidwell couldn’t read it, but he knew that the script was Galard, detailing the many crimes of which Aftran had been accused.

On top of the pole, perhaps six feet in the air, rested an aluminium box, about six inches square. The size of everything else made it look understated; I hadn’t even noticed it on first glance. The plain surface gave no clue as to its purpose, but Tidwell knew what it was. Every yeerk and every host in the room knew what it was.

A yeerk placed in a box like that would be confined in a plain, tiny, silent space, alone.

The thought of being alone sent a thrill of fear through my yeerk mind, which quickly coalesced as fury. They’d taken my friend who had given up everything for peace and freedom and put her in that thing, where she didn’t have room to swim, where there was nothing to taste and nothing to ‘see’ with echolocation but bank walls, where there was nobody to talk to and no way to gain any information about what was going on. The sounds of the Pool complex would echo through the box as disjointed, senseless noise, the only sign that a world still existed out there. With no way of tracking time, it would feel like an eternity of nothing.

According to Tidwell, by the rules of yeerk culture, she was being treated humanely and fairly, because she hadn’t been physically harmed. Visser Three’s position was such that he could execute subordinates on a whim and nobody on Earth had the power to take him to task for it, and if Aftran stood alone she’d have suffered the same fate, but this was political. The last thing even a direct thinker like Visser Three wanted to do by killing a radical was make more radicals. So he had to go by the book. Everybody could plainly see that so far as this terrorist organisation was going, he was playing by the rules. Nobody could complain of a miscarriage of justice here.

But that box could very well count as a fate worse than death. Death is a natural part of the yeerk reproductive cycle, and they don’t tend to fear it quite as much as humans do. That box, however, was built to subject a yeerk to every one of its primal fears all at once. Obscurity. Isolation. Sensory deprivation.

I wanted to tear apart every guard with Tidwell’s bare hands, march right up on that platform and free my friend. But there was no way to get to her. The dozen hork-bajir guards were very well armed, and they’d notice the second I put a foot on the aluminium. The guards, I noticed in a detached way, were pretty well chosen in terms of numbers; just enough to deter rescue attempts, not enough to get in each other’s way. It would be extraordinarily tempting for the Voluntary Movement to try a desperate, doomed rescue at the last minute, which would just make the members that participated even easier to filter from the population by letting them incriminate themselves and die in combat rather than go through the tedious process of being detained and interrogated by the rules. Such a thing would be an idiotic move by any such rescuers.

I had four hours to pull it off.

I stared at that box, fists clenched.

<Aftran,> I said. <It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’m coming for you.>

I just had to figure out how.


	20. Chapter 20

In a bathroom stall, Tidwell swapped me for Illim, before wishing me good luck and casually strolling out like the pair weren’t secret rebels smuggling an enemy guerrilla into their base.

I sat in the stall and started to plan. An hour ago, it had seemed like getting into the Yeerk Pool was going to be the hard part. That if I solved that, everything would fall into place. I hadn’t even thought about the security I’d face inside. It hadn’t occurred to me that the yeerks would be prepared for a rescue attempt on Aftran. But it should have. I should have realised that if the Voluntary Movement could pull it off, Illim wouldn’t have contacted me. The mere fact that I knew any of this was happening meant that it was going to be difficult.

But I did have one advantage: they were prepared for a rescue attempt from fellow yeerks, not from the Animorphs. Andalite bandits shouldn’t know this was happening, and if they did, they’d have no reason to care. They wouldn’t be on the lookout for morphing; at least, no more than was normally the case. I’d have to find a way to use that.

An andalite bandit wouldn’t be expected to save a yeerk. What would an andalite bandit be expected to do?

The thought stymied me for a little while. Things on Earth were getting more complicated. Or it might be more accurate to say that I was only just realising how complicated things on Earth were. Jake had explained a military strategy to me once called a false flag operation. When one group wants to control the perception of another group, they disguise themselves as that group and go do whatever it is that they want to accuse the other group of doing. This is commonly used to start a conflict by pretending another military struck first. Sometimes police use it to invent an excuse to be violent towards protestors, or a large military uses it to pretend a smaller military has become involved in a conflict they were staying out of. In human conflicts, it’s a war crime, for obvious reasons.

But for as long as we wore our ‘andalite bandits’ disguise, everything we did to the yeerks was, technically, a false flag operation. Unless our identities were ever revealed, the andalites would be blamed for our victories and our failures, for our mercies and our atrocities. This had never been important before, since our goals hadn’t been all that different to those of the hypothetical andalite band we were pretending to be, and the most we ever brushed on actual politics was minor agreements to leave certain human military alone. But this was different. However I went about rescuing my friend would reveal the andalite policy, at least according to the yeerks, on this Voluntary Movement.

Would I allow that to stop me from taking the most reliable path I could think of to rescue Aftran? Of course not. But it was worth keeping in mind.

Problem was, I had absolutely no idea what the andalite policy on something like the VM would actually be. All of my interactions with andalites had been dealing with them while they were in a state of out-and-out conflict with yeerks, with little nuance, so I had no data on how they’d respond to such a thing. Ax had been delirious by the time Illim had spoken to me and hadn’t been involved in the rescue planning, so I had no idea how he felt. Arbat and Estrid’s plan to release a bioweapon on the yeerks had been enacted illegally, suggesting that the andalite People would strongly disapprove, but I had no idea whether this was because they believed such means were too harsh to use on a yeerk, or because they didn’t want us humans to be caught in the crossfire, or because they had a general aversion to biological weapons. Would the Voluntary Movement be a good thing to an andalite, or an insult to the concept of freedom, or would they not care and think that the only good yeerk was a dead yeerk?

An andalite would think…

Well, I didn’t know about andalite morality, but strategy was strategy. Friction and discontent in the enemy camp was an advantage; the oatmeal addiction had held the yeerks back for a good long time, and a rebel faction could only cripple them further. The Voluntary Movement was certainly too small to have any real influence or hope of a revolution, at least for a while, so if I were an andalite it wouldn’t really matter whether I wanted them to succeed or not; the chances were remote, and they couldn’t be worse than the current system. But while the yeerk forces on Earth struggled not to tear themselves apart in the meantime, my foes would be weaker.

So an andalite wouldn’t want to rescue Aftran. But they would want to prevent Visser Three from learning about the other VM yeerks from her.

I could work with that.

I closed my eyes, and tried to visualise the layout of the complex, or at least the part immediately surrounding Aftran. She was about halfway between the pool itself and the pool-under-construction, and immediately behind her platform were some warehouses that Tobias had been in last time we were down. Unless the yeerks changed up their storage a lot, I could be pretty confident that it was still storing machine parts.

Right. I’d have to be fast, but I could probably pull it off. If I didn’t, I could almost definitely get both myself and Aftran killed, which wasn’t ideal but would at least deal with the problem. But I needed to get close. Fortunately, if I was direct, and confident, and looked like I knew what I was doing, that shouldn’t be too hard. I had the perfect morph for this.

I focused, and felt myself changing. My body became thin and slender, my neck lengthened, my knees reversed direction. I fell forward onto my hands as my skin deepened to crimson.

The guards were expecting a Voluntary Movement rescue. They weren’t expecting an andalite bandit rescue, but we’d been in the complex enough that the merest hint of our presence would have everyone ready for combat. A Voluntary member might approach as a human, hork-bajir or taxxon, so I could avoid suspicion of being one of those by not morphing any of those things.

Unfortunately, anyone else in the yeerk pool complex was drawing from the same pool of hosts, so any other morph would immediately give me away as an andalite bandit… except this time.

Because Visser Three was coming soon, and he was bringing high-ranking guests from off-planet.

As a tender iskoort, I sauntered gracefully out of the bathroom and into the complex. I drew immediate stares. I knew that there was no possible way that anybody present could have seen an iskoort before. I didn’t hide or shrink away; I made sure to look exactly as if I expected to be noticed as I scanned the area.

The iskoort within me was fairly calm. I expected this from iskoort morphs, as they lacked most of the force behind a normal set of instincts. It didn’t like the hard, unfamiliar floor, which was disorienting compared to the soft mud it was designed to navigate, but the kandrona rays were warm and the air tasted of good pool chemistry under the sour taste of metal and stone dust. The tender iskoort wasn’t afraid of all of these aliens looking at it. The tender iskoort didn’t have any emotion akin to fear.

I sauntered right up to the guards around the platform and drawled, <Is Visser Three here yet?>

The largest guard stepped forward. He was the most muscular hork-bajir I’d ever seen, with a bright blue armband making him stand out from the rest. He looked me up and down cautiously. “Who is asking?”

<Visser Nine,> I said. I was taking a gamble on the assumption that the Vissers probably spread out to all kinds of planets and, if Visser Three and Visser One’s relationship was any clue, didn’t tend to share information with each other. These guys probably didn’t know where Visser Nine was supposed to be, or what kind of host they had. Or if they did know, wouldn’t expect to be informed of any changes.

The hork-bajir was clearly trying to be subtle about inspecting my body. However curious he was, he didn’t seem to think it worth the risk of offending me by asking questions, because he just said, “Visser Three will be arriving with other delegates within the hour. We were not informed of your arrival, Visser.”

<Then your Visser should be clearer in informing you of whom he is expecting, and informing others that they are invited places,> I said, trying to sound snippy. <After all, this is a public interrogation, is it not? Visser Three might be careful to invite his friends, but I would hope to see justice carried out here, for the entire Empire to see. It would be so embarrassing to have rebels festering in the one planetbound Pool under one’s control, would it not?>

The guards relaxed immediately. Another Visser dissing their Visser – that made sense. Clearly I was here to see if Visser Three would be embarrassed politically. That meant I wasn’t a threat to their security; political was above their pay grade.

I stepped up onto the platform and headed straight for the pole in the center, pretending to inspect the writing on it. <So how many traitors has he caught?> I asked. <Or do they still fester among honorable yeerks in the Pool?>

“Ah, Visser, the dais must be clear for security – ”

<This host has poor eyesight,> I said dismissively. <Or do you deny me the right to read the charges? We should know of the dangers within our own Empire.>

The hork-bajir opened his mouth. Then shut it again. What was he going to do, arrest a Visser? It’s not like I was a security risk. Doing anything to disrupt the proceedings would be political suicide and, while I didn’t know much about yeerk justice, I was sure that Visser Three would find a way to have it warrant execution. Aiding a terrorist and all that.

In actual fact, the isk’s eyes were pretty good. Isk were great at distinguishing flat shapes from each other, and I took the moment pretending to read to inspect the little platform on top of the pole that Aftran’s box rested on. The box was at a slight angle and didn’t seem to be welded down.

Just on the other side of the platform were the warehouses. None of the guards had drawn their weapons.

Tender isk are pretty fast.

<Brace yourself,> I told Aftran. <This next bit will be a little bumpy.>

I leapt up, snatched the box, and ran.

By the time weapons were drawn, I was almost off the platform. A Dracon beam scored across my back while, box under one arm, I dashed into the crowd between me and the warehouses. The crowd might as well have been very thick reeds on the surface of the planet Iskoort; I wove between people easily, using them as cover. By the time they ran clear, I was behind the warehouses, diving into and squeezing my way between irregularly shaped machine parts. I used a pointy bit of some large metal thing and tore the box open.

Pool fluid poured over my hands. Sensors in my hands ‘tasted’ the chemicals and consistency; it was slightly stagnant but nutrient-rich. Aftran had been well fed during her imprisonment so that she could be interrogated for the full three days without any annoying pauses. My fingers curled around the yeerk itself and raised her, instinctively, to my ear.

People were coming for us. I squeezed myself further back into the shed while Aftran pushed her way quickly into my ear and connected to my mind. It was fast; my morph was designed to make it fast. Within seconds, I wasn’t in control any more.

<Hi, Aftran,> I said.

<Cassie. You came. I wasn’t sure you were going to – > she looked at my hands through my eyes and then, with a stab of horror, let go. I was in control again. <Sorry, I – I didn’t mean to – >

<Don’t worry about it,> I said. <It’s this morph. It’s instinctive for both of us right now. You get what’s going on?>

<I’m going through it now. Do you have an exit strategy?>

<This is as far as I thought, I’m afraid.> Behind us, the shed was being searched. Controllers moved about mere feet away, murmuring things that my isk senses wouldn’t pick up properly unless I focused on them.

<Alright then,> Aftran said. <Time to get creative.>


	21. Chapter 21

I let Aftran take control for the escape. She seemed to know what she was doing a hell of a lot better than I did.

The first thing Aftran did was move us as far back in the oddly stacked machinery as she could without making any sound before immediately demorphing. Then she wedged the remains of the box under something heavy and pulled the part down onto it, creating a mess of crushed metal and slime. <There,> she said, <the leader of the Voluntary Movement is dead. Problem solved.>

The sound brought the attention of the searchers, of course, and they started moving the machinery. Somebody was giving commands. “Elid, make sure the shed is surrounded. Mana, don’t be precious with the stuff; burn through if you have to.”

We were already morphing. My body shrank; white hair began to appear on the backs of my hands and creep over my body. As I shrank, Aftran moved us away from the sound of the crash, so that by the time I was a mouse, we were completely clear.

The air smelled of oil. And food. And other mice. I was surprised at that at first; that the futuristic alien base might have something as mundane as a mouse infestation. But why wouldn’t it? It had a lot of places to hide, and a lot of food. If I’d had the time, it might be worth tracking them and seeing whether they could enter and exit the pool complex; that would be a useful way in and out for us if we could find it. But Aftran and I were on a clock.

<Right now,> Aftran explained as we zoomed out of the warehouse and between someone’s legs, <they’re thinking more about their superiors and the upcoming interrogation than about your people. They’re thinking, ‘who is that strange yeerk actually working for? Who are they trying to frame?’ After that, when they dig through the shed and can’t find you, they’ll start to debate what strange abilities this unfamiliar host has; and only then will they start wondering whether you’re a controller at all. At that point, escape is going to become extremely difficult, so we need to get out before they start wondering about things like that.>

We had stopped in another warehouse. Aftran demorphed behind a couple of crates, remorphed hork-bajir, and quickly made for an exit.

We were far from the only people leaving; the growing crowd in the Yeerk Pool had seen the prize prisoner been taken. Most were watching the spectacle, but a sizeable portion had clearly done the math and decided that if this went badly, they didn’t want to be around when Visser Three walked in and grandly introduced his high-ranking colleagues to the result. Many exit tunnels were crowded, and the yeerks were just… letting us leave. We walked right by a guard as we entered a tunnel. The guard didn’t give us more than a glance.

By the time somebody shouted to close all the exits, we were passing through the Gleet Biofilter chamber. The filter didn’t activate for people leaving the Pool – why would it? We strode out of a utility shed just out of town that I passed every day on the bus on the way to school. Around us, hork-bajir controllers were disappearing into the trees. As soon as we were out of everyone’s sight, Aftran let go, and I demorphed, put on osprey wings, and headed home.

Ax’s temperature was ninety three degrees.

<Whoa, that’s a drop,> I said.

<How long does he have?> Aftran asked.

<I don’t know. But not long.> I headed for the house. There was no more time to delay, to put off the inevitable. It was time to tell my Dad.

“Dad!” I called as I entered. “Dad, we have to talk!”

No response.

Parents’ room was empty. Lounge was empty. Kitchen was empty, but for a note on the table.

_Cassie – your mom and I have gone out for a ‘skunk-free’ celebration dinner. There’s some lasagne in the microwave. <3 Dad._

He wasn’t here.

He couldn’t… he couldn’t not be here. I needed him! Didn’t he understand that my friend was right there in the barn dying, and I needed him to save him and that was so much more important than some date?!

No, of course he didn’t, because I hadn’t told him. If I’d been honest with him before, he’d be here, and prepared. But he wasn’t, and Ax was going to die, and it was my fault.

<Cassie,> Aftran said, interrupting my spiralling thoughts. <Deal with what is.>

I nodded, and tried to calm myself. Being angry at the circumstances wasn’t going to help. Things were as they were; there was a situation in front of me, and it needed resolving.

I was the only person with two hands who knew how to use a scalpel within miles.

I was going to have to perform brain surgery on Ax.


	22. Chapter 22

Ax was unconscious, which was good, because I had no idea how to sedate an andalite. His stalk eyes drooped while his main eyes moved rapidly under his eyelids. His temperature was ninety two point eight degrees. I had… maybe an hour? Impossible to be sure. There was no regularity to Ax’s temperature drop.

The barn had a surgery, but it was for stitching up skunk wounds and stuff like that. No room in there to operate on an andalite. That meant I’d have to sterilise the bench in the main room and do the best I could with that. I just had to hope that the chances of Ax getting infected with Earth bacteria were low, or that morphing would get rid of the problem.

I scrubbed down the bench pre-sterilisation and went looking for tools.

Dad’s surgery was well-stocked. I grabbed a sterile scalpel in its own little paper pouch, thought a second, and grabbed a second one in case something happened to the first. I grabbed some surgical tape. There was a little suction thing to draw goo out of delicate wounds; I grabbed that, too. Sterile tweezers, just in case, though I really hoped I wouldn’t be digging through Ax’s brain tissue.

I put them all in a sterile metal tray and stuck it on the edge of the big bench. Ax’s temperature was ninety two point seven degrees.

I would need something to cut through the bone.

Dad had bonesaws. They were long, straight, sharp things, and if I wanted to I could use one to cut Ax’s skull right down the middle, like a melon. That seemed a little too invasive.

<I can’t believe we’re about to do this,> I remarked to Aftran.

<We still have time.>

<Yeah, time to freak out even more.>

<Keep it together, Cassie. You’ve already completed one impossible mission today.>

I nodded, and went outside to clear my head. It was a beautiful afternoon. I could see the house across the paddock, and just make out the tiny birds flitting around the bird feeder in the garden, still brimming with spring flowers.

I frowned at the feeder. I knew it well. Dad had made it, and it was pretty simple in design; a wooden box on a stake, with a little hole for the birds and a removable tray inside to fill with seed. The hole was a couple of inches in diameter to keep the big birds out. It was probably about the size of the hole I’d need to make in Ax’s head.

I jogged to Dad’s workshed behind the house. Unlike the barn, I hardly ever went in there, but Dad was a meticulously organised person; finding his power tools was no trouble at all. The hole saw had multiple attachments to make holes of different sizes; not knowing which I’d need, I took them all back to the barn and dropped them in a small jar of ethanol.

Ax’s temperature was ninety two point four degrees.

<It’s dropping faster,> Aftran said.

<Yeah,> I agreed. <And we have a problem. I don’t know where the _tria_ gland is. >

I reached out and roughly shook Ax’s shoulder. He didn’t respond at all. “Ax,” I said urgently. “Ax, wake up for just a second, please. I need to know where the _tria_ gland is. I need to know how to save you.”

He didn’t move.

I got some ethanol and busied myself sterilising the workbench. <Aftran,> I said.

<No,> she responded.

<You can get in there. You can find out where the gland is and save his life.>

<No.>

<You have to.>

<No, I don’t. And I won’t. There’s absolutely no way he’d agree to something like that.>

<He can’t agree or disagree! He’s unconscious!>

<And that’s a reason to violate his boundaries, is it, Cassie?>

I put the ethanol away rather more forcefully than necessary. <This isn’t some freedom-of-the-people ethical discussion, Aftran! He’s going to die!>

<This is a freedom ethical discussion, Cassie, and yes, he will. And that’s his right to decide. Think about everything you know about Ax and tell me if there’s any doubt in your mind that he’d choose death over even temporary infestation.>

<I can’t… we can’t be certain,> I said weakly.

<I won’t go prying, but it’s obvious that you are certain. And so am I.>

<But if it’s you...>

<If it’s me? Why the hell would he care if it was me or not? Cassie, last time we met, back in the forest, Ax really, really wanted to kill me. He was all-out ready to behead Karen to get to me. They all were, really. But the thing is, they had different reasons. They were all completely heartbroken over you, of course, and for Rachel, that was where her fury began and ended, I think. Marco and Tobias were both very worried about the security threat I presented. But to Jake and Ax? That security threat existed, but that wasn’t the main problem. They straight-out hated me. Not for what I’d done – I mean, they hated me for that too, but I could’ve been out there alone with Karen and never run into you and never learned anything about the Animorphs, and they’d still want to kill me. Only their affection for you held them back. Ax despises yeerks, Cassie, all of us. I very much doubt he has a concept of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ yeerks; just some yeerks being less of an immediate threat than others. He’d rather die, I’m sure of it.>

<Well, I’m sorry if I’m not okay with letting a friend die over some stupid narrow-minded ideal!>

Aftran was silent for a long time. I filled in the pause by morphing enough hork-bajir muscle mass to carry Ax to my makeshift operating table. Then I went to fetch an electric razor so that I could shave the incision site, once I knew where that site was.

Eventually, Aftran said, <Would you not die for your ideals, Cassie?>

<That’s different!>

<Why? Because they are yours?>

<Because they’re practical! Morality isn’t about just picking a bunch of random stuff and piling it into a hill to die on! Things like mercy and justice and freedom and respect are… they’re social technology, designed to create societies where people can have the best lives possible. And yeah, sometimes people die or lose out for dumb reasons, because the ideal has to stand above actual instances occasionally, like people die in car accidents as part of the cost of efficient transportation. But that doesn’t mean people should just drive off cliffs, and it doesn’t mean Ax should die for something stupid like this!> I stuck the thermometer in Ax’s ear.

<Because you don’t understand the logic? Would you expect to? The morals that you have are a function of your society and the inclinations of your species. So it is with andalites, so it is with yeerks, so it is with everybody. Do you intend to impose humanity on the galaxy? Is that the path you want to set your species on?>

<What we do to the galaxy is outside my power. But will I inflict my humanity on my friend to keep him alive? Yes. Yes I will,> I said savagely.

<He’ll never, ever forgive you.>

<That’s fine. He can hate me for the rest of his life if he wants. He’ll have a rest of his life to hate me in.>

Ax’s temperature was ninety two degrees. It was dropping ridiculously fast. Ax was shivering, but looked no more conscious.

<Alright, Cassie,> Aftran said. <For you, I’ll do it.>

She squirmed out of my ear. I caught her in my hand and lifted her instead to Ax’s. I watched her flatten out and worm her way in. Somehow, having done it myself made it seem grosser. I remembered what that was like, questing with a tiny tendril of myself, squeezing my extremely mutable organs through as a long thread…

She was in there for about a minute, during which Ax’s temperature dropped another tenth of a degree. If a human’s temperature was dropping that fast, I’d be very worried. I could only hope that an andalite’s physiology could handle it. Aftran pushed her way back out of Ax’s head as fast as she could; even I, knowing nothing about yeerk body language, could see that she wasn’t happy about the whole thing.

I lifted Aftran back to my own ear and plugged in the razor while she got herself situated. <Do you have it?> I asked.

<I have it.>

My mind flooded with a sudden flash of memory that wasn’t mine. I was in the teaching glade. The violet grass beneath my hooves was weak and soft with repeated trampling, indicating that it was late in the teaching season.

The twelve of us were there; all of the children of teaching age within our grove cluster. Most of my attention was on Eldiron-Malakta-Innuvo, a female half a season older than me with the most delicate tailblade I’d ever seen. She had clearly used it to try to trim her own _taktalin_ ; the patterns in her fur were jagged and amateurish, with the blue and white shapes patchy and uneven and the trimmed edges of the violet outer coat jagged. My right stalk eye lingered on her. I wondered if her coat would feel as rough to the touch.

My main eyes were of course pointed at the holographic model that _ethil_ Mondorin was displaying. I didn’t want to be disciplined for not paying attention again, so I had to look like I was taking it in. I wasn’t focusing on the model, but it was there, in front of my eyes – the outer glands of the brain. _Kortul_ gland, center of the forehead; _miatul_ glands, one behind each ear; _tria_ gland –

I pulled myself back to the present. The gland was about two inches back from being right between Ax’s stalk eyes. I shaved the spot on his head, checked the thermometer in his ear (ninety one point seven degrees), and went to scrub up. I washed my hands and arms thoroughly, pulled on a clean surgical gown that was too long for me, and set my hair in a hairnet. Then I scrubbed my hands and arms again, returned to Ax, and pulled on a pair of sterile gloves.

Ax’s temperature was ninety one point five degrees. Any moment now, he’d be back at normal temperature, and liable to die at any moment. It was time to get started.

I unwrapped a scalpel and held it over the spot.

<Uh, Cassie?> Aftran prompted me, after I’d stood there for about ten seconds.

<You should take control,> I told her.

<I what?>

<Well, I don’t want to do it!>

<I don’t either!>

<You’d be better at it. You’re a yeerk operative, you have… training.>

<In surgery?! I spent a year in the head of an eight-year-old girl because I chickened out of the yeerk version of being a mall cop! Between the two of us, exactly one of us has done emergency surgery and it wasn’t me!>

<Cutting someone’s leg off is a lot easier than brain surgery!>

<Great, so we’re both completely out of our depth!>

<Your freaking out isn’t helping.>

<Your freaking out isn’t helping!>

I clenched my teeth and pressed down. It was just the initial incision. It’s impossible to screw up an initial incision to the skull, right? There might be… nerves and muscles and stuff leading to the eyestalks but… but they wouldn’t be so far back. Right?

I pressed down until I felt bone. Blue blood welled around the scalpel. I sliced down the back of Ax’s head, then turned the blade ninety degrees, cutting a flap. I folded this up out of the way and secured it with some surgical tape.

<There,> I said. <No problem. Easy. Brain surgery is easy.>

I selected a hole saw that looked about the right size, then changed my mind and grabbed the next size up. Better too big than too small. I fitted it into the drill, shook off the excess ethanol, and planted it against the bone. Before I could think about it too hard, I started drilling.

Drilling bone isn’t that different to drilling particularly stubborn wood. I’d drilled wood before. Bone dust was more complicated than sawdust, being that I didn’t want any bits of skull in my friend’s brain, but I knew how to deal with that. Circular saw in one hand, suction device in the other, I drilled down for a few seconds, cleared the dust, drilled for a few more. By the time I was through the skull, Ax’s body temperature was normal.

I took a moment to calm myself. I cleaned my tools, got a new scalpel. Changed my gloves.

<You’re stalling,> Aftran pointed out.

<Sterility is important.>

<Cassie.>

<I know, I know. I’m doing it.> I sucked away any remaining blood, and levered the circle of bone up out of the skull.

There it was. The brain.

It looked nothing like any brain I’d ever seen. I was used to brains being giant walnuts. This was more like… like someone had taken a handful of ropes of very slightly different shades of very pale blue-grey in different sizes, coiled them all up together, and shoved them into Ax’s skull. And all around it, stretching through the cerebral fluid from the brain itself to the skull was what looked like bright white spiderwebs. No, not spiderwebs, more like… like somebody had taken one of those novelty silly strings and squeezed it all in there, and it had dried out, leaving gloopy, shrivelled strings between the two surfaces.

The _tria_ gland was right where it was supposed to be; a little nodule nestled in the curve between two coils of ‘rope’. It was bluish, which I supposed meant it must have a good blood supply. Whether that was normal or part of inflammation from the infection, I had no way of knowing.

I raised my scalpel in one hand, tweezers in the other. Both hands were trembling. That wasn’t good. One wrong cut, and Ax could permanently lose his ability to thought-speak. Or breathe.

I told myself that that wasn’t the case. Brains evolved from the inside out; it was a natural consequence of evolution. Nothing fundamental to survival would be on the surface, would it? But all of these glands were, so maybe the early parts of the andalite brain had ended up on the outside, with new components being built on the inside…

Falling into the pattern of thinking about biology helped calm my nerves. The trembling in my hands lessened.

<Do you want to know how _yamphut_ works, Cassie? > Aftran asked.

<Yes, please.>

< _Yamphut_ is an uncontrolled infection of the _tria_ gland, > she explained, <usually caused by _mitra_ , the first discovered zero-space-traversing infective agent. _Mitra_ causes fever but is relatively harmless except in its tendency to attack the _tria_ gland. >

I lowered the scalpel to the gland, careful to keep the blade steady.

<Most young andalites contract _mitra_ shortly after getting their translator chip installed, but when caught young it tends to sit benign in the _tria_ gland. But when the _tria_ gland undergoes trauma, _mitra_ can flare up, reproduce litically in the _tria_ gland and cause other disease organisms to overwhelm it. >

I slid the blade under the gland. The brain tissue below it was stiffer than I expected from a living brain, making it easy not to dig into it as I slid the scalpel very carefully along.

<The _tria_ gland is part of the andalite immune system. It tends to attract and eliminate various types of disease organisms, but if it fails, sepsis in the brain tissue can occur. >

I slid the scalpel along the top of the gland, where it connected to the upper of the two ‘ropes’ it was between. Careful, careful. Almost there.

<With modern agriculture, _yamphut_ is quite rare, but cases do crop up occasionally. It’s important to avoid thought-speak around the subject, because the sudden increase in _mitra_ can flood other nearby brains via zero-space and, if there are enough infective agents, overwhelm their _tria_ glands as well. >

I gently lifted the gland out of the skull with my tweezers and tossed it into a kidney dish. Then I pushed the missing circle of Ax’s skull back in place, pulled the skin down, and taped it shut. I didn’t even bother with stitches; Ax would be able to morph the wound away soon enough. Right?

<His morphing and thoughtspeak?>

<Will return,> Aftran confirmed.

I finished taping the wound, laid Ax back down in his stall, and collapsed onto a bale of hay. I was shaking all over from the adrenaline crash. I wanted to lay there and sleep for a week.

But I couldn’t, because I still had a lot of work to do.

I cleaned up everything from the surgery. I put the biohazards in the incinerator, the tools in the autoclave tray, and scrubbed down the surfaces. I put the saw back where I found it and filled Ax’s water trough.

Then I got to work feeding the animals, handing out medications, and cleaning cages. I checked on Tobias, who seemed to have no fever but couldn’t thoughtspeak yet. He blinked blearily at me. I left him in the cage just in case; I didn’t want him flying into a tree and hurting himself.

Then I went inside, microwaved the lasagne my parents had left me, and ate it.

And _then_ I went to sleep.


	23. Chapter 23

It was a bright, glorious morning. The light of the rising sun filtered through the leaves outside my window and danced on my face. I opened my eyes and saw it, and so did Aftran.

<Good morning,> she said.

<You’re okay,> I replied. I’d never expected to see her again, but here she was. She’d done something momentous and brave, and I’d saved her, and she was okay.

I was trying hard not to think about the fact that I had a yeerk in my head. That was a train of thought I needed space to parse. I didn’t want to know how I felt about it right then. I didn’t want to decide how to feel about it with an audience. So instead, I opened the window, and leaned out to watch the sunrise.

<You saved a lot of lives yesterday,> Aftran said. <I wouldn’t have been able to hold up against his interrogation for long.>

<You don’t need to worry about him anymore,> I said.

<I know. Cassie… you know what needs to be done now.>

<I need to check on Ax,> I said. <See if he’s recovered enough to get on his feet and eat some – >

<You have to kill me.>

<What? That’s crazy, Aftran. I just put everything on the line to save you! I’m not going to kill you!>

<You saved your people, and my people, and a lot of other people. But you can’t save me, and you know it. Why do you think rebellion is so rare in the Empire? Without its sanction, we starve. I have three days, and then I will die painfully. I don’t want to go like that. I’d rather take an easier way out. But yeerks aren’t physically gifted, and I will need your help.>

<No.>

<You say that now, but I know you won’t make me starve.>

<You won’t have to starve,> I said quickly, forming the ideas as I spoke them. <You can live in me. We can… we can get you a false name or something, and I’ll be a voluntary controller and – >

<You haven’t thought this through. We both know that there’s no way you could stand a life like Lance Tidwell’s. And the danger involved, with us going down there every three days, would be ridiculous.>

<The chee manage it,> I pointed out. <The other people in your movement manage it. Besides, access to the Pool like that could be a huge asset in the fight.>

<They’re all on the books. I’m a fugitive. They think I’m dead, but the first biofilter I walk through is going to tell them otherwise. And even if we found a way around that, using your access to the Pool for the fight would get us caught. You’re not going to have Tidwell let you in again, are you?>

<No,> I admitted. <It could put him and Illim in too much danger.>

<You and I know far more dangerous secrets than Tidwell and Illim do.>

<Fine,> I said. <Plan B. We use the _escafil_ device to –  >

<No.>

<Why not? It would work. If this is a consent thing, I can tell you right now that the Animorphs will vote in favour of letting you use the _escafil_ device to become a _nothlit_. You just saved Ax’s life. Do you think they won’t save yours? >

<This isn’t about them. It’s about me. I can’t give up who I am.>

<Who you are? You’re your mind, not your body!>

<That’s such a human thing to say. Body and mind, remember? Kandhan and Ravhan. To live as a bird in a world of color and freedom, or a whale in a Pool the size of the ocean, or to make a human body of my own… those are all glorious adventures, but I won’t kill half of myself to do it.>

<And yet you’re asking me to kill all of you! Isn’t saving half better than none?>

<Not necessarily. It’s not… look, the commitment to my practices is part of my ravhan, understand? We are taught by the Empire from birth to hate ourselves, to see ourselves as superior to others but still disgusting and weak and helpless. They do it to control us. Our enemies look upon us and see the same thing – disgusting, slimy, primitive slugs using the stolen physical and mental power of their slaves. Self-pride is something I had to learn, bit by bit, in the silent darkness of the Pool, surrounded by the ravhan cultured by the Empire, all of it pressing in and threatening to extinguish mine. I’m not throwing it away now.>

<This isn’t about pride, Aftran! It’s not about the value of your physical body on its own merits; it’s about survival! Your environment changed. You need to adapt.>

<Why? I don’t need to do anything. You’re human, Cassie, I don’t expect you to understand.>

<But you helped me with Ax. You didn’t want to but you did it. It’s okay for Ax, but not for you, is that right?>

<Yes. Because you need him. Everyone in this conflict needs him! As much as I don’t like andalites and don’t approve of what his military is doing, he’s helping you defend your people. And the fate of both of our people, your species and my voluntaries, depends on humanity being able to protect itself from the Empire. He can help you.>

<You can help us, too.>

<No, I can’t. I’ve given up everything for this cause twice, Cassie, and I’d do it again without hesitation, but what you’re thinking won’t work. I can’t be a Tobias for you; I can’t scout or track or help on missions. I can’t be an informant; I can’t tell you about yeerk organisation and plans. There can’t be any suspicion whatsoever that I’m alive, and especially that I’m with you.>

<Why not?> I asked. <A yeerk-andalite alliance. Give them a scare.>

<And if andalites do show up to help, can you risk being taken for yeerk collaborators? You barely talked them out of releasing a dangerous virus last time! More directly, the suspicion would destroy the Voluntary Movement. We occupy murky political territory. Despite Visser Three’s love of the practice, wanton murder of subordinate yeerks is in fact a crime, and things are political enough that he’s had to start actually paying attention to such laws. Some of the things we do are crimes – host sympathy is a crime, as is inciting contempt of the Council – but a lot of our talk isn’t. It is not a crime to ask questions about why our Pools are silent and why our work periods bring us to the brink of starvation. It is not a crime to interview our elders and try to piece together the culture that has been destroyed in our exodus. The Visser is being forced to pin actual crimes on us before execution, which is slowing down his progress against our party; a big part of the reason my interrogation was to be so public was that his main goal was to have me publically admit that the Voluntary Movement is a criminal organisation. If he can convince people that I’m working with andalite bandits, I’ll be doing just that. It will condemn the entire organisation; ‘affiliation with the Voluntary Movement’ would become a crime and anybody expressing any dissident opinion, whether they’re actually affiliated with us or not, could be easily charged and killed. The risk is too high. I have far more value as a martyr than as an andalite collaborator.>

<Then morph and leave. Run away. Fly away. Swim away. Whatever. They’ll never find you.>

<And I won’t be a help to you, which brings us back to the initial discussion: whether I should save my life by destroying myself. I won’t.>

<I feel like somewhere in our time apart, our roles switched.>

<What do you mean?>

<I mean, last time we met, I was trying to commit suicide by morphing, and you told me I was an idiot. Now you’re committing suicide by not morphing.>

<And am I an idiot.>

<Yes. You are.>

<I’m so sorry, Cassie. You’ve taken a lot of risks on my behalf. But ever since we made our small peace together in that forest, it was always going to end something like this. I’m just… happy I got to see you again first.>

<I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?>

<No. I’m sorry.>

My eyes had filled with tears during our conversation. I brushed them away to gaze once more at the sunrise. <Then we’d better do all we can to make the next three days perfect.>


	24. Chapter 24

Technically, we had two and a half days, since I’d already slept since rescuing Aftran. Two and a half days to fill with everything Aftran wanted to do before she died.

She wanted to go to school.

The other Aimorphs could survive without me for a few days. I went to school. It seemed like a waste of time to me, but Aftran had never seen the high school that served as a recruitment hub for teens. Jake, Rachel and Marco were still out sick, which was causing some gossip among our year.

“I’m telling you,” Juan was saying while we waited for history class to start, “I saw Rachel and Marco making out behind the shed. I bet they caught something off each other.”

“What about Jake?” Terry asked.

“Well, you’ve seen Rachel. Maybe she – ”

“You know Jake’s her cousin, right?”

“Ah. Well maybe he got it from Marco.”

“Excuse me,” a girl called Talitha cut in, “but Marco is way too cute to be gay.”

“Bi,” Terry corrected. “It’s called bi if they like both boys and girls.”

“Whatever.”

“Wasn’t Jake with Cassie now?”

“Hey Cassie,” Juan called, ignoring my attempts to look invisible. “Is Marco bi?”

“The last person I heard Marco call a babe was a purple alien,” I shrugged. “That’s all the information I have on the subject.”

“Was it from Star Trek? Some of those Star Trek aliens are hot.”

“This just in, Juan likes Klingons,” Terry said.

“I’m sorry, Klingons? Did I say Klingons?”

“Didn’t have to.” Terry cupped his hands around his mouth and raised his voice. “Hey, everyone! Juan thinks Worf from Star Trek is – ”

Juan tackled him, and I used the chaos to turn away and busy myself with my books.

<Aren’t you glad you left Karen before having to sit through years of this nonsense?> I asked Aftran.

<I like Worf from Star Trek.>

<Hmm. No comment.>

Everyone immediately found their seats and focused on the front as Mr Tidwell entered, sweeping the room with his looking-for-someone-to-give-detention gaze. His eyes rested on me for the barest fraction of a second, then moved on.

<You should talk to them,> I said to Aftran as he started writing the day’s work on the board. <Say a proper goodbye.>

<Why? They already think I’m dead. Soon, I’m going to be. There’s no need to… confuse matters.>

<Are… were… you and Illim close?>

<He is one of my upper cadre,> she said.

<I don’t know what – >

<It means I trusted him a lot. Now, the fate of my species rests on him, and the handful of others like him.>

<This’ll hurt them, you know. Tidwell already lost his wife.>

<And now he has Illim to help him. The two of them, and everyone else, will get over this. My fate will remind them of what they put on the line for this cause. People will use it to bolster their beliefs and their commitment; others will be scared away, and that’s good too, because anybody who feels that way should leave before they are similarly tested. None of this is ideal, but it was always going to happen. I was going to get caught eventually. I was going to die eventually. This is the best way it possibly could have gone.>

<That’s a very… mercenary perspective.>

<I think I’ve earned the right to be mercenary, don’t you?>

We skipped out of school at lunch and checked on Ax. His fever and delirium had completely subsided, although he couldn’t thought-speak yet. His hand signs to me were cold and neutral; the clean, unshaded sorts of signs he used when teaching me a new base word for the first time, without tone or personality. I pretended not to notice – discussing what I’d made Aftran do to him was going to have to wait two more days – and watched him head back out into the forest, towards his scoop.

Then we went flying. We put on osprey wings and looked at the whole city from the air, then flew out over the forest. We headed for the hork-bajir valley, watching the tree-lined mountains spill out forever below us until we were at just the right angle where suddenly, the valley was below us, its handful of residents moving about the trees on some hork-bajir task as sunlight sparkled off their waterfall and tiny stream. The satellite dish tied to a tree, trailing cables, was strangely incongruous with the picturesque scene.

We changed to seagull wings and flew out over the ocean. Below us, dancing waves hid a world of unfathomable depths that humankind hadn’t yet fully explored, and wouldn’t in the near future; a world full of wonders far beyond what any human had actually seen and possibly beyond what we could conceive. To the majority of our planet, down there, this little squabble between humans and yeerks meant nothing at all, and however it resolved itself, they probably wouldn’t notice any change.

We demorphed high in the air, morphed dolphin on the way down, and dove into the water. We threw our cares away and played for a good ninety minutes before refreshing the morph and heading to shore.

The sun was setting when I washed up, exhausted and human, on the beach. My delicate human skin didn’t have the insulating blubber of a dolphin, and the chilly air was already creeping into my bones as I lay on my back on the sand, breathing hard, and looked up at the moon.

<Have you ever been there?> I asked Aftran.

<No. I mean, maybe. Visser Three launched a surprise attack on the andalite fleet from a crater in there, when they came to liberate the planet, and I think I might have been in a Pool on one of the ships involved, but I’m not sure. I never looked it up.>

<Being in a Pool doesn’t count. You can’t experience anything that way.>

<Not necessarily true. A Yeerk Pool or an anthill or a lake of fish are all their own, rich, complicated worlds. But I can’t experience _this_ from in there, no. A good Pool is basically the same no matter where you build it. >

I stretched my arms up in front of me, blocking the moon with my spread hands. My heart was still racing from the exertion; it felt like it would never slow down. <I don’t think I like any of those small worlds.>

<You’re not supposed to. You’re a human. They aren’t for you.>

<Planets aren’t for me, either. Or even cities. My people were hunter-gatherers until very recently. We’re not built for… this.>

<You seem to be making it work.>

<You guys are making big worlds work, too.>

<We could do it better. If we did it together.>

<Yeah. We could.>

We nearly fell asleep, right there on the beach. But the twin threats of hypothermia and being grounded forever dragged us up out of the sand, and we went home.

We skipped school the next day. I spent my allowance on as many cookies as I could fit in my schoolbag and then we went out to a beautiful meadow in the forest we’d seen the day before and sat down and ate them until I threw up. I showed Aftran how to build a shelter the andalite way and she showed me how to weave branches into long pipes that weren’t watertight but could keep out the mud, so they could be used to connect Pools built in swampy earth and allow yeerks and nutrients to travel between them. I taught her some andalite handsigns, and she taught me a smattering of Galard. Then we went tracking small animals for a while, just to watch them go about their business.

The chee were due back from the airport around three, according to David, so at two I asked Aftran if she wanted to meet them.

<No,> she said, with venom that caught me off-guard.

<I know they’re technically enemies of your people, but so are we, and we’ve done way worse stuff than they have. I was even going to let Estrid release that virus until I realised – >

<That’s war. I don’t like it, I don’t approve of all of your decisions, but you can’t afford to be lax in self-defense. You kill because you have to, or think you might have to. The chee are torturers.>

< _Torturers_? They’re not physically capable of violence! >

<How lucky for them, then, that their definition of ‘violence’ is so narrow.>

<What are you – ?>

Aftran sent me a concept. A flash of that box she’d been in, and of the memory of being inside that box. That open, expansive nothing that was worse than death; the complete isolation, the lack of connection with one’s poolmates, with one’s world. A flash, too, of Erek’s impassive face. And I understood.

Erek and Jenny had been keeping yeerks in worse conditions than Aftran had been in for at least a year. Probably a lot longer. I felt a sudden rush of pure revulsion; not Aftran’s, but my own. That somebody could do that. That somebody could think that was okay.

Still, out of habit, I tried to mount a defense. <They can’t just let those yeerks go,> I pointed out, weakly, <and they can’t kill them. What are they supposed to do with them?>

<Oh, I don’t know,> Aftran snapped. <Maybe build a Pool for them? They have a huge underground dog park and they can’t build a Pool for two yeerks? Two is a very small group, but it’s something! And don’t try to tell me they don’t have the technology – a species that can keep yeerks alive inside their head for years on end should have no trouble building – > She stopped, as both of our trains of though caught up with her rant.

<You know,> I said offhand a few second later, <I think the chee still owe us some favours. Should we pay them a visit?>

<Hell yes.>


	25. Chapter 25

We beat the Kings home. David was out, so I let myself in the back door, made a cup of tea, and waited for them.

It didn’t take long. Erek and his dad strode in, stacked their suitcases neatly against the wall in the lounge, and looked at me through the door. They didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“Is everything okay?” Erek asked.

I sipped my tea. “Are you up to date on what happened with the yeerk invasion while you were gone?”

He frowned. “No. Did something big happen?”

“Have you heard of the Yeerk Voluntary Movement?”

“Only rumours.”

“Well, their leader was caught.”

His eyes widened. “So they do exist!”

“Not only do they exist, but their leader had spent time in my head before. She knows all about the Animorphs, and you.”

“And Visser Three has her?! We need to move fast – ”

“It’s fine. We already rescued her.” I sipped my tea again.

Erek relaxed. “Where is she now?”

I tapped my temple.

His eyes widened again. He stepped back. “You’re a controller.”

“She’d like to speak directly with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Uh, sure, I guess.”

I put my tea down and stood up. Then I let Aftran take over.

She strode across the room and poked Erek in the chest. “You complete asshole. If I didn’t have respect for the integrity of Cassie’s bones, I’d be punching you in the face right now. You can play dress-up as a teenage boy all you want but I know you’re smarter than this. I know that you know very well that ‘hey, my programming lets me do this, so it must be a good thing’ isn’t right. What the hell?!”

Erek stepped back. “Uh, sorry, but what on earth are you talking about?”

My eyes were blurry with tears. Aftran narrowed them. “I’m talking about that poor yeerk that you’ve been holding in solitary confinement and sensory deprivation for who-knows-how-long,” she hissed. “Are they even a yeerk anymore? Or have you drained their ravhan to nothing? Do you honestly, truly think that what you’re doing to that poor yeerk isn’t violent? Would you treat an aggressive dog this way?”

“What do you want from me?”

“What do I _want_ from you? Isn’t that obvious?” Aftran brushed the tears from my eyes. “I want to make it clear that I’m not threatening you or your people. I’m not going to try to coerce you, even though you deserve it, because Cassie would never forgive me. Cassie thinks you’ll help her anyway, so this is how you’re going to help. You’re going to build a Yeerk Pool for me and for those poor sods you lot have been imprisoning. It’s going to have adequate nutrition and be of our preferred temperature, and it’s going to have room to swim around. Don’t even try to tell me you can’t do it. How long would it take?”

“Uh… an hour perhaps?”

“Alright then.” Aftran sat back down and somehow contrived to sip tea angrily. “We’ll wait.”


	26. Chapter 26

We waited. We were mostly left alone, although Mr King kept glancing in on us, apparently to see if we were still there. What were they worried about, that Aftran would hijack my body and go tell everything to the Empire? If she was going to do that, she wouldn’t have bothered coming to the King household first and openly identified us as a controller.

<Why didn’t you tell your Dad?> Aftran asked out of the blue, halfway through our second cup of tea.

<You know why,> I pointed out. <I planned to, but I never got the chance.>

<I didn’t know ‘rationalist’ meant ‘good at rationalising’,> she replied drily.

<What do you mean?>

<You had lots of opportunities. You kept putting it off. Personally I think that was the right decision, but you were so set on having him do the surgery, so it confuses me.>

<You know everything I know,> I shrugged.

<Sure, if I go digging through your mind for it, but I don’t think either of us want that.>

I sighed, and drew up memories of David’s first few missions; his fear, his incredulity at the danger and how unprepared we tended to be, his panic at facing death for the first time. <How do you think Dad would react, knowing that his daughter was out there risking her life in this war?>

<He wouldn’t be able to stop you.>

<No, he wouldn’t. But if he tried and I ignored him, it would ruin our relationship. And whether he tried to stop me or not, he’d sit up all night in fear for me every time I went on a mission, and blame himself if I didn’t come home.>

<He’d blame himself anyway. And as for his fear for you, isn’t that something he has a right to? To know what’s going on, even if it’s horrible, so that he can try to protect himself? That’s the argument you gave Rachel about Melissa.>

<Yeah,> I admitted. <But this isn’t really about him.>

<Why, then?>

I almost shut her down. She wouldn’t pursue this line of enquiry if I asked her not to. But I knew that she was only doing my job. I was supposed to ask myself these questions, not bury my own hypocrisies beneath flimsy rationalisations. So I answered the question.

<We’re out there fighting for our lives all the time,> I said. <That Yeerk Pool mission was insanely dangerous. And it wasn’t the most dangerous thing we’ve done this term, not even close. And we have to keep getting up and going out and doing it, because it’s important; because this world, this fight, is bigger and more important than any of our lives. I can’t afford to look into my father’s eyes and hear that kind of fear from him. I can’t afford to listen to him trying to tell me how insane all of this is. If I go out on a mission like that, it will kill me.> I put my head in my hands. <I’m pathetic,> I admitted. <I’m supposed to care about the truth. I should tell him and accept his point of view without flinching, because if he’s wrong it’s irrelevant and if he’s right I should accept it. But I didn’t, and Ax could have died because of that. I put my friend’s life on the line to keep my father out of the war, because I don’t want to face the truth about things. When did I become such an awful person?>

<Hmm. I’m not sure I entirely understand your philosophy. Can I look – ?>

<Yeah, go ahead.>

Aftran was silent for about half a minute. Then she said, <I think you’ve done this backwards.>

<What?>

<Well… I’m new here and I might be wrong, but it looks like you’re kind of getting yourself tangled up in knots over not being a perfect computer. This doesn’t strike me as the most practical way to tackle this problem. You’ve decided in advance what sort of person you’re supposed to be, declared that any deviation from the personality you want to have is bad, and then tried to rationalise and prioritise everything to fit that only to get upset when it results in making bad decisions. A more constructive approach would be to lay things out as they are without value judgements, and only apply them later, after you’ve made your calculations. The facts are neutral; your values determine your response to them. Getting all muddled about whether the facts are in themselves representing the right values is just creating a mess.>

<I don’t understand what you mean.>

<Okay, well. You’re a planetary defender with the power to protect your species, and you have to use that power to do so. In the grand scheme of things, the seven Animorphs’ lives are a miniscule price to pay for what’s at stake. Plenty of people your age or younger have given their lives all throughout human history to defend their families and homes, and have had a great impact. You know these things to be true. You’re also a fourteen-year-old girl who should be worrying about grades and bandaging animals and not being thrust into weekly life-or-death decisions and planetwide moral quandaries; you’re small and surviving on luck, and all of this is far too much for one kid to deal with. You know that to be true as well. None of these facts are contradictory; you don’t have to pick a side. You already know and accept all of them; you’re not betraying your values by not wanting your loved ones to remind you of the bad perspectives every single day and throwing you off your game right before a mission. Your mental and emotional stability affect your performance in the field, and it isn’t delusion to take care of them. That’s just practicality.>

<I put Ax’s life at risk,> I replied. <That’s not practical. Dad would’ve been a better surgeon, but I chose my own selfish wants anyway.>

<No, you didn’t. Firstly, I don’t think your dad would have been a better surgeon. He stitches up barbed wire wounds on animals, he doesn’t do brain surgery. He’s more familiar with a scalpel than you are, but you’re a lot more familiar with andalites than him. How was that going to go? ‘Dad, here’s my dying alien friend; by the way aliens exist and some of them are invading the planet and I can magically turn into animals and fight them all the time. Anyway you have about three days to process that before you need to save my friend’s life’. He would’ve been more of a mess than you in there simple because of all that information he’d have to deal with.   
  
<Secondly, you didn’t choose your secrecy over Ax. You chose to tell your dad right away; the problem was that you didn’t commit properly to either decision until it was too late because you wouldn’t let yourself run the calculations. You were too worried that you wouldn’t reach the ‘right’ decision, so you jumped to the conclusion you thought you were supposed to reach without going through everything properly, and you kept delaying action because you weren’t sure of it. If you had run the calculations, you would’ve been able to act more decisively in whatever path of action you chose.>

<You’re pretty smart, you know.>

<It’s your brain; I just fake it. But on the upshot, you know a lot more about yourself now, and can use that to make clear and accurate decisions.>

<What, that I bury myself under about six emotional problems at once to avoid facing hard decisions?>

<That shouldn’t be new to you, you’ve been doing that since the beginning of the war.>

<Ouch.>

<I meant that you have more data on how much you value the innocence of your parents in this war. That hadn’t been tested before, right? You’d always assumed that you kept them in the dark for safety and convenience’s sake, but that you’d be able to confess and rely on them if it ever came down to it. Now you know how important it actually is to you that they’re kept out of this, and you can alter your security accordingly.>

<Yeah,> I said. <Yeah, you’re right.> I drummed my fingers on the table. <By the way, I owe you an apology.>

<Me? Why?>

<I was going to let Estrid kill you. I was going to let her kill everyone with a bioweapon, because protesting would have been socially uncomfortable. I didn’t move to stop her until I learned that my own species was at risk. I didn’t even think.>

<You didn’t know about the voluntaries. You just knew that it would help protect your people.>

<I knew about _you_. I escaped our last deal on a ridiculous fluke of morphing, while you were still trapped forever in that Yeerk Pool. I… forgot you were there, right at the target site for that virus. I didn’t even consider it. I’m sorry. >

<I don’t blame you for that, Cassie.>

<Why not? I basically tried to kill you! Again! I killed your brother out in the forest, do you remember that? I didn’t even have to; he was just in the way! And – >

<And I’m an ex-slaver who spent years squashing any voice of yeerk dissent or sympathy among the little grubs who didn’t know any better, just like everyone else did. We can’t change those things. How about we focus on what we’re going to do now?>

<You mean interspecies world peace?>

<I mean interspecies world peace.>


	27. Chapter 27

The Yeerk Pool that the chee had built was small, but it was easily big enough for three yeerks. It looked a bit like a metal bathtub with a thin piece of metal bisecting the middle. I reached out and brushed the metal with my fingers. It felt rough, and Aftran understood; it was a safety screen, with holes too small for a yeerk to squeeze through, so that the yeerks on either side could interact but couldn’t cross over and physically attack each other. Without knowing the disposition of the other yeerks, this was a smart move.

I knelt at the edge of the Pool and tilted my head. I felt Aftran disconnecting from my brain.

<You’re okay with this?> I asked. <Plan _nothlit_ is still an option. >

Aftran laughed. <I’m fine. I can’t help you, I can’t help my voluntaries, but I can help these chee prisoners. Come and tell me how the war is going occasionally, will you?>

<Of course,> I said.

We said goodbye, and Aftran finished disconnecting and dropped out of my ear. I watched her swim around her side of the tub and then down under the surface, exploring her new home.

Aftran had been right. I couldn’t keep forcing myself to think only things I was supposed to think and reach conclusions I thought I was supposed to reach. I couldn’t keep neglecting to do the calculations if I thought I wouldn’t like the answer. I’d let emotionally overwhelming circumstances make me intellectually lazy, and indecision just put everyone at risk. I should have been clear with myself about whether I was getting Dad involved, and when.

I should be clear with myself about what I was going to do now.

Viruses had been cropping up in our lives a lot lately. They were the reason only I had gone down the Pool; an alien virus had put Ax’s life at risk and stripped the Animorphs of their abilities as animorphs. Our previous trip down had been because of a virus, too. Estrid’s virus would have damaged the yeerks, maybe weakened them enough to let the Animorphs gain a bit more ground, but apart from killing a lot of people it wouldn’t have changed anything. Yeerks can quarantine themselves extremely easily, and humans have thousands of years of practice at the same thing. You couldn’t attack the yeerks with a virus.

More accurately, you couldn’t attack the yeerks with that type of virus.

I remembered the first time that Aftran had showed me a yeerk’s perspective on life. Kandhan and ravhan, drifting and spreading out over time, meeting and interacting in new ways; the solid physical self, and the mutable mental self. Or as a human might simplify it, genetics and memetics.

A yeerk’s kandhan was easily tracked and inspected and quarantined. As Aftran had proven with the Voluntary Movement, that was not true for their ravhan. If we were careful and lucky, a good mind virus could bring the Empire to its knees with a far lower body count than war. And I knew it could work, because I’d seen it work before. I’d spent days on an entire planet of successful case studies, where cousins of yeerks had genetically engineered their own hosts and dealt with each other fairly and opened a vast, expansive, open nation spread across their plant, hungry for trade and interaction and new experiences in the form of shared memories.

When we returned from Iskoort, I’d wondered whether Ellimist’s game had been about the planet, or the chee, or the howlers, and decided that it had been about all three. His games always seemed designed to reach multiple goals at once. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might also have been about us; infecting us with a concept of a peaceful yeerk society that none of the Earth yeerks would otherwise ever get a chance to hear about. But Iskoort was proof that it could work. Not soon; they would need a planet, and space to grow without being in war, and probably a whole lot of tech they didn’t have… but right now, they didn’t need a quick fix, they just needed a chance to strive for a better future.

I couldn’t burst into the Yeerk Pool complex and start telling everyone about a crazy space adventure I’d had, but knowing that it could be done, I might be able to help them come up with how to do it themselves. Yeerks who felt unjust in their conquest or simply trapped in their bodies would have something to work with, then. The Voluntary Movement might gain some legway. The idea I had was obvious, but I hadn’t thought it through before, because it was also pretty mean. I hadn’t wanted to be right. I hadn’t wanted it to make sense.

But that wasn’t helping anyone. I had to explore all the possibilities, and if I still didn’t think it should be done, all I had to do was not do it.

I turned to Erek, who was watching the pool.

“Your friend’s kind of forceful, isn’t she?”

“She’s just angry,” I shrugged. “She’s actually pretty sweet. Hey, Erek, you know how the yeerks sometimes try to target specific potential hosts? Or how the school and the Sharing have pipelines to try to get voluntary, or at least nonresistant, hosts when they can?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a… a list somewhere? Of targets?”

“Oh, certainly. Not ‘a’ list, but different projects have recorded priorities based on their needs, ease of host conversion or abduction, that sort of thing.”

I nodded. “And the yeerks haven’t just grabbed everyone at once, because they’re limited by things like manpower and cage space and the need for secrecy,” I said, thinking aloud. “There are other factors limiting their rate. So if they had a list of ten targets or a list of a hundred, it wouldn’t actually result in more or less controllers either way – it’d just affect prioritisation, right?”

“Logically, yes,” he said, frowning. “What’s this about, Cassie?”

“It means that there’s no point in trying to destroy such lists unless you were trying to save a specific person, because even without priorities the yeerks would get the same number of people. It also means that if you were to add names to a list, you wouldn’t increase the number of controllers, just change the order of things. The person you put on would be taken faster, but someone else would be taken slower, right? It evens out.”

“Simplicity of acquiring a host is one of the things that affects priorities, so putting other random names on would probably slow things down a little,” he said.

“Even better. Erek, if I were to get you a list of people, and in the future you happened to be in a position where it would be easy and safe to alter some infestation priority list – it doesn’t matter which one – is that something you’d be able to do? It’s not hugely important, nothing you’d want to put yourself at actual risk for, but if it comes up...”

“You want more people to get infested?”

“No. I want the right people to get infested.”

“What are you doing, Cassie?”

“It’s complicated,” I lied. “Would you be willing to do that if it comes up and you can do so safely?”

“Certainly. Get me a list and I’ll memorise it.”

I nodded. “Here it is.” And I started to list names.

The names I gave Erek mostly belonged to friends of my parents. A lot of them were biologists, and a few were avid scifi fans as well. I gave him the people who were the most curious, the most fascinated by puzzles and new phenomena, who looked at something that didn’t make sense and asked why. The people who, while they would hate being a yeerk slave as much as anyone, would also watch, and listen, and ask ‘Why did you do that? Why are things like this? Why are the Pools so silent, the workdays so long, the freedom of speech so curtailed? Why is yeerk art non-existent, why is your study of your own biology so lacking?’ They were the people who would whisper those questions to other humans between the cages, passing them on; the people who would see our current conflict and cope by dreaming of a better future.

Estrid had taken a lot of risks to design a virus for Arbat that would transmit from human to yeerk and weaken the Empire. It was a masterful use of biology, but she needn’t have bothered. Humans already had the virus to do that, breeding in our minds. All I had to do was unleash it.

All I had to do was give those people over to the yeerks.

Yes, it would even out. Give one to save another. That didn’t make it feel right. But this was war; nothing we did felt right any more. That’s why I needed to _think_ right instead – sometimes, there wasn’t a right answer. Just the least wrong answer.

I gave Erek every name I could think of, and then I went outside. I looked at the flowers in Erek’s garden, waving in a gentle breeze; flowers that Aftran couldn’t see. I could have taken her with me, but she’d been right – I couldn’t handle Mr Tidwell’s life. It would take me apart and kill me.

If I hurried back to school, I might catch last period. I might be able to turn ‘in serious trouble’ into ‘in a little bit of trouble’. Instead, I turned toward the beach.

It was a beautiful day. It would be a shame to waste it.


End file.
